The AMBOSS-Anki Crash Course
Ready, set, Anki
Your step-by-step guide to becoming an Anki pro. Level up your study game with these pointers from the ultimate Anki expert—the AnKing.
Your step-by-step guide to becoming an Anki pro. Level up your study game with these pointers from the ultimate Anki expert—the AnKing.
.jpg)
After creating the wildly effective AnKing decks and scoring 260+ on Step 1 and Step 2, who better to learn from than the AnKing himself? He'll walk you through:
• An intro to Anki as a study tool
• How to most effectively use Anki throughout med school
• Using foundational study techniques to combine AMBOSS & Anki
• An exclusive look into the Anki Mastery Course
The 5-part crash course covers each of these topics (in 5 minutes or less!):
Quick & easy tutorials that cover everything you need to get started
Pro study tips from the AnKing & Anki community for every skill level
Advice for effective study habits using an integrated toolset
Two challenges all medical students face are not only covering vast amounts of info, but also developing the long-term memory to recall that info for exams and clinical experiences. And here’s the problem: Your brain is programmed to optimize, so it removes knowledge you don’t routinely need (like small details on exams).
That’s where Anki comes in, helping you to:
• Strategically review content spaced out over time, using a method called spaced repetition.
• Ease your workload, save time, and maximize your knowledge retention by integrating your previous recall performance as opposed to showing randomly selected cards.
• Automate the repetition interval you need with built-in algorithms, which prevent you from forgetting details and promote long-term retention. This is called: “Flattening the Forgetting Curve.”
Why to build your foundations with Anki:
• Anki takes the guesswork out of studying. It automates your review schedule and measures your progress as you go.
• A reliable study & review schedule with Anki means confidence before exams plus more efficient studying, giving you time back for personal activities and wellness.
• In case you need a recommendation ;) – the AnKing deck is a free resource that delivers the most up-to-date, comprehensive collection of flashcards to prepare medical students for in-house assessments and ensure success on the USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 examinations.
Use the AMBOSS add-on to link up with a medical library containing more than ‘20,000 medical topics
• AMBOSS x Anki is a powerful learning combination that provides a seamless connection between the cards you need to review and exam-relevant content in the AMBOSS Library, helping you close learning gaps quickly with all the info you need.
• Hover over recognized terms in your cards for quick summaries with pop-up explanations, then review topics more in-depth as needed with the side-by-side format of Anki and the AMBOSS Library.
• As Nick says, there’s a lot of medicine to learn, and the AMBOSS add-on is here to help!
Extra Tips for Reviewing Cards
• To retain your knowledge as best as possible and for Anki’s algorithm to help you get there, it’s important to do your scheduled Anki cards every day.
• The Anki algorithm uses your feedback to customize your tool use and make sure you are maximizing your knowledge retention. To schedule cards effectively, provide feedback on cards with the following guidelines (and be honest for best results!):
.jpg)
• Pomodoro Timer
• Get Total Card Count to Zero!
• Review right & wrong answer explanations with unique teaching points
• Online Lecture Series
• Class Lectures
• AMBOSS Articles
• Unsuspend Cards
• Get Total Card Count to Zero!
You can do a LOT with Anki, but it can be easy to get lost in features! The Anki Mastery Course provided by our AnKing partners helps you dive into this world of more “advanced” Anki.
• Learn about all kinds of options to customize and adjust the tool to your personal needs, including displays and card creation or adjusting your schedule around weekends, holidays, or exams.
• The Mastery Course also provides additional tips for gamifying your Anki experience and making your study experience a little bit more fun.
Complete the learning loop when you apply the knowledge you’ve been learning & remembering in Anki to AMBOSS practice questions that will prepare you for exam day.
• It’s important to do many unique questions in order to prepare properly and simulate exam experiences. The AMBOSS Qbank with 5,700+ high yield USMLE questions offers an ideal blend of active learning through recall and application.
• The AMBOSS Qbank is also engineered with many smart features to help guide your learning & critical thinking process as you work through questions. Answer explanations, highlights, and “Attending Tips” in AMBOSS can be useful for updating your cards and helping you get it right next time!
.png)
Backed by peer-reviewed research and the USMLE exam performances of thousands of students, spaced repetition is a proven method for effective knowledge retention and success in med school. Any resource which is open source and offers students such a benefit is one we can get behind. Reason enough for us to join forces with Anki.
Taking it a few years back, we received hundreds of feedback requests from students looking to combine their Anki flashcards with our comprehensive learning platform. It's part of our AMBOSS philosophy to incorporate ideas from students to create better study tools. Since we aim to constantly evolve to meet students' needs, the AMBOSS add-on for Anki was a no-brainer.
Meet some of the brains (and personalities!) that created the AMBOSS add-on.
.jpg)
“I love that we support an existing community of learners, and that we can connect them directly to the amazing content created by our medical experts here at AMBOSS. If I can build a vehicle that really lets their hard work and passion shine through, that’s so cool. Finding better ways to learn has always fascinated me, and I’m excited to see that the combination of spaced repetition with instant access to the entire body of AMBOSS knowledge, in context, at the right level of detail, works so well for a lot of people. I love working in a team where I get to make that possible.”
Yann, Software engineer
.png)
“As someone who's studying medicine, I know how difficult it can be to deal with the workload. Anything that can help you reduce that and be more efficient – well it feels really rewarding to create something like that. This goes especially for bringing Anki and AMBOSS together, as both have been trusty companions throughout my own studies. Also from a community perspective, being able to take something that is collaboratively created, all these decks and cards, and being able to enrich that with information, feels like being part of something bigger.”
Aristotelis, Glutanimate
Crash course complete and ready to jump in? To download the AMBOSS add-on, just copy and paste the following code into Anki.
• The add-on is compatible with Anki 2.1.26 and higher and their standard builds. You can download the latest version here.
• It is now also available for your iOS and Android mobile devices! Learn how to enable mobile support here.
• It’s free to try, but you do need an AMBOSS account. Create one now — it takes less than a minute.
• The add-on works with any Anki deck.
• Make sure you’re using the official AMBOSS add-on which can only be downloaded from this page. If you’ve downloaded it from anywhere else, please contact customer support from our Help Center.
Looking for more technical information on the add-on or running into issues? You can find answers in our Help Center.
© 2024 AMBOSS. All rights reserved.
The United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE®) is a joint program of the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB®) and National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME®). None of the trademark holders are affiliated with AMBOSS.