For example, I often knew the answer after reading only 3 words of the question! I could tell this blind memorization wouldn’t translate to boards-style problems. The one qualm I had is I found myself memorizing the card more than learning the facts themselves. I actually liked this deck and was able to get through the cards fast. This deck covers most of the facts in First Aid but not everything. Many medical students claim to have found success with it in the past to prepare for Step 1. This defeated the purpose of long-term spaced repetition altogether!Ī few months later I started using the Brosencephalon deck. Not studying the cards meant I forget them. However, I never ended up continuing to review these cards after the tests. However, the devil is in the details.Īnki sounded like a great idea, so I started to use it here and there to memorize a bunch of facts before each of my tests. You’d do well in your classes and ultimately the USMLE Step 1. It uses spaced repetition so you can memorize enormous amounts of information. When I first came to medical school, I heard about Anki. Here is Adam Nessim: How I Came to Use Zanki Here Adam Nessim describes why he started using Zanki – and why he stopped.

“Memorize a gazillion facts, and you’ll do great on Step 1!” However, there are many hidden costs (and questionable assumptions) underlying this approach. These include Zanki, Brosencephalon, and a host of others. I might consider someone with a step 1 failure if the other exams are all much better and there's evidence of academic growth in the remainder of the application.A trend in med school is using pre-made Anki decks with 20,000+ cards that promise to cover “everything” on Step 1. Certainly a step 3 failure is an immediate screen-out on my part. With that said, even though step 1 is pretty much irrelevant to me I do still screen out people if they've failed a step exam. Step 2 is less important than 3 but more than 1 so its conversion factor is in the middle. their performance on step 1 is pretty irrelevant to me other than that they passed it. But I'm looking at fellowship applicants these people have been in clinical practice now for a minimum of 3 years. Within that formula are conversion factors for each of the board exams and I weight step 3 more heavily than steps 2 or 1. I don't just interview the top 60 people by points, sometimes someone lower down has something in their PS that makes me interested in meeting them sometimes someone in the top 60 has other red flags that make me put their application to the side. I'm still going to look through all of the applications but I do it in order from highest points to lowest points. One way I do that is with a formula that assigns points to all of the items on the ERAS application (board scores, publications, presentations, etc), and reduces the application to a number that I can then stratify. In the first stage of fellowship application review, I'm sifting through hundreds of applications and trying to come up with a way of narrowing down the list to a more manageable number (to determine who to invite for interviews). Keep in mind this is an n of 1 each institution and training program will have their own way of evaluating applicants.

Step 3 anki deck