Lessons Complete:
Why Your Anki Cards Likely Aren’t Improving Your Score
When you get a question wrong, what do you do afterwards? If you’re like most people, you assume it’s a problem of knowledge, and you immediately go and make an Anki card on a simple fact you found in First Aid. Maybe you make cards based on the question explanation.
However, in most cases, making simple, factual knowledge cards will NOT help you improve your score. Instead, you need to consider WHY you are missing questions, and make cards to address those specific things.
In this lesson, we’ll go through the 3 major kinds of questions you’re missing. Then we’ll go through how to make cards to reduce your chances of missing them again.
Make Pathophysiologic Chronology Cards to Improve Knowledge AND Recognition
Remember, most people make cards as if their problems are all lack of simple knowledge. That is rarely the case, as you’ll see. Instead, much more of your cards should be in the “pathophysiologic chronology” format!
Some Timely Inspiration
I’m grateful to get lots of emails from students who have seen large boosts in their scores. Here is one I received the day before our lesson, highlighting the importance of QI in improving scores:
3 kinds of questions you’ll miss, and the cards you need to make to fix it:
- Knowledge gap
- E.g., infants have thymus visible on CXR
-
Step 1: 30-40% of missed questions
- Step 2 CK: 10-20% of missed questions
- Solution: simple knowledge card to fix that gap, ideally asking for WHY a particular thing is
- Recognition problem
- E.g., haven’t strongly considered diagnosis by the 3rd sentence/have it be high on differential, don’t know the right diagnosis, can’t differentiate between two diagnoses
- Step 1: 40-60%
- Step 2 CK: 70-80% of missed questions
- Solution: make pathophysiologic chronology card
- Any diagnosis question you miss → make pathophysiologic chronology card
- Don’t know what they’re asking you
- E.g., people think that there is a very specific question being asked, but it’s actually a general principle
- Solution: (don’t make a card) practice consistently with each question, making clear stand-alone questions
-
10-20% of total wrong questions