i'd rather actually use physical revision cards which i hate rather than use anki because it was just so complicated you can't really write anything in depth on them you can barely fit anything on really messy to organize and really easy to lose hi everyone welcome back to my channel i'm hibber and i'm a fourth year medical student at the university of manchester in this video i'm going to be sharing with you how i memorize everything for my exams without using revision cards if that sounds good to you then please like this video and subscribe to
my channel as it really helps me out so i've never really been a revision card person i never really use them i feel like you can't really write anything in depth on them because there's never enough space you can barely fit anything on i also find them really messy to organize and file and i find them really easy to lose so i just don't use them at all i've always preferred to just get an empty notebook and write really really long detailed notes just the act of writing them allows me to memorize what i'm doing
however if you've been researching the best ways to study then you'll know that writing notes is actually one of the least effective ways to revise shockingly for me because i feel like it's always worked for me in the past but considering the evidence on studying it's actually one of the least effective ways to study in order for you to commit information to your long-term memory your study needs to incorporate two things the first is active recall which means trying to remember something that you've learned rather than reading it with the answer in front of you
again and again and the second thing is space repetition this means going back and repeating the topic at different time intervals to prevent forgetting what you've studied so this is why revision cards are so popular because it allows you to do both of these things as a medical student you may have heard of the software anki which is a online revision card software which allows you to create revision cards online i tried using this as well and i still found that it was so difficult to get my head around i just couldn't understand it and
i'd rather actually use physical revision cards which i hate rather than use anki because it was just so complicated to figure out and i know some people swear by it so do try it out if you think it may be beneficial but i'm going to in this video explain my way of doing things and my way of writing notes which make sure that i'm doing it in the way that helps me but also doing it in a way to incorporate the evidence-based study techniques the active recall this based repetition everything that kind of science has
said is going to help me study i found a kind of middle ground between writing revision cards and writing long notes which incorporates active recall into it so this is what i do firstly if you're going to write notes about anything change the title into a question so if you're about to write a paragraph of notes about the management of vowel obstruction instead of making the title the management of bowel obstruction change the title to be a question so what is the management of bowel obstruction doing this tiny tweak in your titles is actually going
to prompt you to think about that and kind of just get your brain thinking about what it already remembers and how it's going to answer this question on this topic next the main thing i want to talk about is how i actually lay out my notes what you want to do is divide your page in half as you can see i've drawn a line down the middle and divided the whole page into half and i've done this for every page in the book so what i do is i actually write the question on one side
and then write the answer on the other side so sort of kind of giving it a revision card format with a question on one side and the answer on the other but having it all in one book and having the questions one after the other so firstly this immediately takes away the aspect of having to organize revision cards and kind of losing them all the time also it allows me to write as much as i want and write quite long notes after being prompted by an initial question which would be the front of your revision
card on this page we have a few shorter ones but on this side you can see that i've got just one question at the top here and i've written like a huge amount of information about that as the answer to it which i wouldn't typically be able to fit onto a revision card so you can basically give all of your notes as much space as they need while still having all of your notes in one place this way you still have the space to incorporate any diagrams or pictures or anything that you'd have to make
multiple revision cards on one topic for so for some of the questions in here i have answers that go on for a couple of pages which if i had written it on a revision card i would have had to use four or five revision cards just to fit that information on so now you might be thinking where does the active recall come into it because clearly if i read this it's just like reading through notes it's not going to be very effective because i can see the answer it's right in front of me so this
is why we divided the page into two you get a piece of paper or a piece of card or anything really that you have on hand with a straight edge um over here i just have this file typically i'd obviously place this down on a table and be revising like that but i'm just going to hold it up to show you so what i do is i uh go through my notes with this card kind of thing covering the other half of the page that i've written the answers on so going through my notes i
can just read out the question and then i think about that as if i would think about question before turning onto the other side of a revision card that allows me to actively remember the notes that i've written and use it like a revision card but without actually having to create revision cards when i'm revising my notes i go through all of the questions in order and then when i'm ready to reveal the answer i just like drag this down and read the answer and see where i've gone wrong see if i've missed anything out
and then the next time obviously that answer will be covered again and the next time i try to kind of try to do it from memory so i can just go down and reveal the answers in this way and not only does this allow me to combine the active recall aspect of a revision card into one place it allows me to still have that note-taking and note-writing kind of process and write long notes in a book which is really helpful for me and the act of writing notes really does help me to memorize things but
now i can actually combine it with the beneficial aspect of using revision cards obviously i haven't used any color in these notes that i'm showing you right now but you can incorporate color you can highlight things if that's what you find helps you so here you can see i've done a page about cardiac murmurs on aortic regurgitation and this means i can have all the information on the same page in the same book in the same area as i would if i had written a book of notes on this topic it allows me to keep
them all combined together and in one place but it means that i can also have that kind of testing myself layout that allows me to test myself the best thing about it is that it literally works for anything if you look at any of your notes in any book i guarantee you you can change the title of those notes into a question and then write the notes as if you were answering that question and thinking about the question rather than a block of text that you would typically see in a textbook and this is going
to really help you memorize and actively recall the information that you're learning i know it may seem really really simple and it may seem like something that's not very revolutionary is that a word i'm not sure if that's a word um revolutionary but honestly it is really really effective do try out i've been using this method for my exams for ages now and i always perform really well it allows you to be really to the point where you need to be for some of the questions and for you to get in those questions about the
finer details but it also allows you to have the space and have the kind of note writing process for where you need to write that bit more information and maybe write a couple of paragraphs about a certain topic and it allows you to have all of them combined in the same space it's much easier to organize than tying elastic bands around 10 revision cards on one particular topic you just have one notebook that you're going to write everything in easy to store it doesn't make any mess in my house so i would really really recommend
this if you do end up trying it out then please do let me know let me know if it was helpful for you if you found this video useful please give it a like and also subscribe to my channel because it really helps me out let me know if there's anything you want to see more of and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you
