How to Study with Flashcards as a Medical Student : Guide for Medical Board Exams and Finals

Studying medicine is a highly demanding journey that comes with an insanely huge amount of material to memorize… from all the individual parts of a skull to the Kreb's cycle in biochemistry. This is why finding effective study methods is crucial not just for getting good grades, but also to give yourself free time for your hobbies, family, and self-time.

I am Dr. Kasey Chen (the social media manager at Voovo) and I was once a medical student who found herself struggling to find ways to keep up with her studies and have a decent social life. A tool that really helped me throughout all my 6 years at medical school was flashcards — I started off by making physical flashcards in my first months of medical school to using Voovo in my last years, so perhaps I can call myself a seasoned flashcard user.

As a self-named seasoned flashcard user and fresh medical school graduate, I have compiled a guide on how you can study with flashcards as a medical student! Keep on reading to find out more, so that you can take control over your studies and grades.

First of all, why flashcards?

Flashcards are a time-tested, invaluable study tool that use active learning and spaced repetition to speed up your study process and enhance your long term memory.

1. Speed and efficiency is important because of the huge amounts of information you have to memorize. You will never feel like there is enough time to study for an exam and find yourself in a constant feeling of overwhelm, but if you can use your time efficiently, you’ll be able to cover everything! Flashcards are especially effective because they break down complex topics into manageable subtopics which allows you to focus on one subtopic at a time.

2. Long term memory is important because as a medical student, your knowledge is cumulative from the beginning of med school until the day you graduate and start working. When you start working, your cumulative long term knowledge that you gained during medical school becomes crucial!

The power of flashcards as a study tool stems from active recall, as opposed to passively reading material. Active recall is implemented when you have to recall or remember a piece of information without a hint. For example, a flashcard asks you a question and you have to actively recall what the answer is. The neuronal firings that happen when you actively try to recall a piece of information actually helps strengthen neuronal connections and enhance long term memory.

How to Make Flashcards for Visual Subjects like Anatomy

The beauty about flashcards is the fact that you can add pictures to them! If you are making physical flashcards, you can always draw out anatomical (or physiological, biochemical, pathological, etc) diagrams and put the labels on the back of the flashcards. I did exactly this in the first bit of med school, but it can be quite time consuming! This where Voovo Flashcard App comes to make your life extremely easy with Diagram Flashcards.

Voovo was actually created by another medical student who had the same problem that I did — the fact that making flashcards was extremely time consuming, even if you use a flashcard app! So, he created his own flashcard app (Voovo) that tackled all the problems that he (and I) encountered in med school. The first problem was solved by diagram flashcards / image occlusion cards.

What are diagram flashcards?

Diagram flashcards, also known as image occlusion flashcards, an AI powered solution that allows you to make up to hundreds of flashcards from diagrams in under a minute! Below, you can see a picture where a diagram flashcard is being studied on Voovo, in which the blue box covers a text label of a heart.

How to Study Your Flashcards after Making Them

Make sure to fully embrace studying with active recall.

This means that when you are going through your flashcards… focus very hard on recalling the answers BEFORE you flip the card! This process of trying to remember something will help form new neural networks to make you remember something better and help you retain information for a longer period of time. The scientific basis of this is something called synaptic plasticity: the connection between your synapses (the connections between neurons) cam ne increased or decreased over time, based on how frequently you use the particular synapses.

Each time you successfully recall a piece of information, the synaptic connections become stronger and more efficient, making it a lot easier to recall the said information in the future! 

Utilize Spaced Repetition

Spaced repetition is a method of reviewing flashcards at increasing intervals. This technique is highly effective for long-term retention. Flashcards are the most effective tool for implementing spaced repetition into your studies. You can create traditional, physical flashcards (a more hands-on way to study) or use modern digital apps like Voovo.

Digital apps automatically track your performance and adjust the time intervals between future review sessions based on how well you perform! If you can recall a concept accurately, the app will schedule a review session at a farther away time and you will see it less frequently. On the other hand, if you struggle to remember a card, the app will prioritize it so that you can review it frequently until you’ve mastered it!

The same system is implemented when you study with physical flashcards, but you do it manually. You can divide your flashcards into piles based on how well you know the material — “Mastered”, “Review occasionally”, and “Needs Practice”.

Schedule review sessions throughout your day!

Consistency is truly the key to effective studying throughout medical school. You cannot cram an information dense subject like pathology in a week, even if you are (most likely) a genius! The beauty of studying with spaced repetition flashcards is that the key is to have short (30 minute) study sessions spaced out throughout your day… you can study while you are on the bus to your campus, between classes, on the couch before dinner, basically anytime and anywhere.

Use Voovo App to Master Studying with Flashcards 📖

Voovo is an all in one spaced repetition flashcard app that was created with a single goal – to make studying what it should be: easy, efficient and enjoyable. We are here to make your study sessions more effective and less stressful so that you can have both a fulfilling personal and study life. 💪 are you ready to transform your learning experience? Download the Voovo app for free from the App Store or Google Play!

We hope that this was a helpful guide and that it inspired you! Do you have any tips or hacks for the other fellow students reading this? If so… be sure to leave a comment below. Also, subscribe to our substack for future blog posts about studying, med school, and educational news!