Cards

Flashcards written from a board's own notes, approved before they join the deck, scheduled for you, and drilled a board, a subject or everything at a time.

Every board has a deck. Its cards are written from the board's own sections (the notes you wrote, pasted or imported, and pictures once they have been described), not from its title, so they ask about your own material. The web and the iPhone drill the same deck on the same schedule.

A drill looks like this:

Making cards#

On a board's Cards tab, Make cards writes questions from the board's notes: the whole board, or only the sections you pick. Each card tests one fact, and a statement in your notes often becomes a fill-in-the-blank card (___).

What comes back is a tick-list, not a deck. Untick anything you don't want, then Add: nothing joins the deck before that, and a drill starts straight away. Discard throws the list away. If you leave, an unadded list is still there when you come back on the same device, and so is a batch that was still being written when you left.

The maker is shown what your deck already asks, so a second run after you add notes covers the new material. When you add, any card whose question matches one already in the deck (ignoring case, punctuation and spacing) is dropped, and you are told how many.

A picture that has no card yet gets one in the same list, made without AI: the picture is the question and the card's name is the answer.

A lesson you pass in a board's Learn course puts its own questions into the deck by itself, with the marking key as the answer: no AI, no tick-list, and nothing counted. A card you have deleted is not put back.

On a board shared with you, the cards you make are yours: they go into a deck of your own, join your own due queue, and the owner never sees them.

On the free plan you get 20 written cards across your account, counted beside the button as Cards 12 of 20. A run is cut to what you have left, and a card counts once it is written, whether or not you keep it. Picture cards and cards from what you got wrong don't count. With none left, Make cards tells you so. See plans and usage.

Scheduling#

Cards are scheduled by FSRS, a spaced-repetition method. It runs on its standard settings, so it works from your first card with no history of your own.

Before the answer, How sure are you? offers Guessing, Think so or Sure (keys 1 to 3 on the web). A pick shows the answer; Show answer skips it. It is never scored and never changes the grade or when the card comes back: it is kept with your study record and read by nothing else. Skip it three times running and the drill stops asking on that device; Ask how sure on the drill brings it back.

Show the answer (Space or Enter on the web, a tap on the phone), then grade it Again, Hard, Good or Easy (keys 1 to 4 on the web). Each button shows the interval it books.

Grade honestly; the schedule has nothing else to go on. A card marked easier than it was comes back after you have forgotten it. Grades only set the schedule; they are not a score.

Worth knowing:

• Again is the only grade that counts as a lapse. It also sends the card to the back of the session, so you see it again before you finish.
• Hard means you recalled it with effort. It shortens the next interval; it is not a failure, and the card does not come back this session.
• Due means due today: a card booked for later today is already in the queue.
• Intervals are capped at a year.
• New cards are capped at 20 per session. The rest stay due, and Keep going at the end deals the next batch.
• Cards due on the same day are shuffled, so you learn the content, not the order.
• With nothing due, Study anyway drills a board's whole deck ahead of schedule.
• A card failed five times is flagged as a leech, and stays one. It usually means the card, or the note behind it, needs rewriting.

The deck's numbers show how many cards it has, how many are mastered (an interval of a week or more) and how many are leeches.

Undo, editing and deleting#

Undo takes back your last grade and brings the card back with its answer showing. It is one grade deep and works from the finished screen too (z on the web).

Edit changes a card's question and answer, from the drill or from the deck's card list. The schedule stays as it was, and a picture card's picture can't be changed. On the web the card becomes two boxes in place; on the phone a sheet opens, which also holds Delete.

Delete takes the card and its schedule out of the deck. The web deletes at once; the phone asks first.

Show on board (On board, on the phone) opens the section a card came from, and you come back to the drill where you left it. If that section has changed since the card was written, the answer side says so.

Queues#

The same drill runs at three scopes:

• This board: the board's own Cards tab.
• This subject: every board in the subject's index, pooled. Review all on the subject dashboard's Study tab opens it, as does the subject's due count on the phone.
• Everything due: every deck you have. On the web it is Review due cards in ⌘K (or g then r); on the phone, the due card on Home.

The wider queues take what is due from each board, most overdue first. A grade always lands in the card's own board, whichever queue you graded it from. A subject's queue never shows a card from a board outside its index, and an archived board's cards are in no queue. On the web a queue opens on a summary with Start; on the phone it opens on the first due card.

The subject and Everything due queues also deal in the lessons a board's Learn course is due to ask again: the summary says Plus 2 questions from your Learn course, and each comes between the cards as a written question headed From your Learn course. Answer from memory, say how sure you are if you like, and Mark it for a mark out of 2 against the lesson's key, with what you missed; Skip leaves it for next time. It is not a card: it is never graded, never joins the deck, and its mark goes on the lesson. A board's own drill and a Practice pick deal none.

A subject's Practice tab makes a fourth, one-off queue: the boards and sections you pick, due cards only or every card.

Leave a session part-way and going back to the same queue picks it up where you left it, on either device; it is also offered under Continue (on the web, on the subject's dashboard). Only one unfinished session is kept, so starting another replaces it, and a Practice pick is never kept. On the web, the ← button at the top of a drill ends the session rather than leaving it waiting.

Cards from what you got wrong#

What you have shown you don't know is written up as cards for you, from:

• questions that lost marks on a paper;
• viva criteria you scored under 60% on, and gaps the examiner picked out in what you said (when the station belongs to one board);
• points a check in a board's Learn course found missing;
• a card you keep failing, rewritten as one or two simpler questions (picture cards excepted).

They wait in a tray headed From what you got wrong on the board's Cards, Exam, Oral and Learn tabs, each saying where it came from; on the web the Cards tab shows how many. Untick any you don't want, and Add puts the rest in the deck at once; Not now sets them all aside. In the drill they carry a From what you missed label. They don't count towards the free plan's twenty.

Under them, the tray offers to set a paper, write a lecture or write a viva station on the points still open. Those cost what they cost anywhere else; on the free plan they use your one exam, podcast or viva.

Nothing is added without you, and nothing is written twice:

• Same miss. Re-marking or resitting a paper, or failing the same station on the same criterion again, does not produce a second card.
• Turned down. A card you untick, set aside or later delete is not offered again.
• Same wording. As for every card, a question that matches one already in the deck is dropped. Picture cards are matched on the picture.

The match is exact, so two different phrasings of the same fact can both get through.