Too many lectures, not enough week
Behind on Lectures Before the Exam? Triage Them, Don't Catch Up
Eighteen lectures, one week, no cards made. How to rank lectures by exam weight, spend limited hours on the right ones, and stop pretending you can catch up.
It is Sunday night. The block exam is next Monday. There are eighteen lectures in the folder and you have cards for four of them. You have been telling yourself you would catch up this weekend since the second week of the block.
You are not going to catch up. Not on all eighteen, not in seven days. That is arithmetic, not a character flaw. What you can still do is decide which lectures get real work, which get a fast pass, and which you let go, and make that decision on purpose instead of at 2 a.m. on Thursday.
Rank the lectures before you open any of them
Do not start with lecture one because it is first in the folder. Spend thirty minutes producing a ranked list, then work it from the top. Four signals do most of the ranking.
- Objectives. Count them and read the verbs. Twelve objectives that say "explain the mechanism" outweigh four that say "list".
- The block map. Many schools publish how many exam questions each lecture gets. If lecture seven carries eight questions and lecture twelve carries one, the ranking is done for you.
- What the professor flagged. An in-lecture poll question, a starred slide, the phrase "you will see this again". Upper years usually know which lecturers recycle questions.
- What you already know. A renal physiology lecture you covered in undergrad or already have in AnKing ranks below an in-house lecture on the school's own protocol.
One credit, one lecture, one decision
You have limited hours and a limited number of generations. A new account has five credits and each output costs one, so asking for everything on lecture one spends three before you have touched the rest. Decide per lecture.
- 1
Story for the lecture you do not understand
If you could not explain the mechanism to a classmate, cards will not help yet. Read the walkthrough first, then decide whether that lecture needs cards at all.
- 2
Practice for the lecture you think you know
Your sense of "I know this one" is often recognition. A practice set from that lecture tells you in half an hour whether it is true, and the explanations for the ones you miss point at the slide you skimmed. See lecture to practice questions.
- 3
Anki only for lectures you will still be tested on after this exam
A card made today is a review you owe next month. If the material comes back on the cumulative final or on boards, that debt is worth it. If it dies with this exam, practice questions give you more per hour.
When to skip the Story and go straight to Practice
The Story is the understanding layer. Skip it when you attended and followed the lecture, when the topic is familiar from a previous course, or when the lecture is a list (drug names, bug classification) rather than a mechanism. Go straight to a practice set and read the explanation for every question you miss. Each explanation walks the mechanism beside the source slide, which does the Story's job for the parts you got wrong.
Do not skip it when you were present in body only, when the slides are sparse and the professor talked around them, or when you catch yourself reading the same sentence for the third time. A first-year on r/medicalschool described exactly that. Rereading is the wrong tool for it. Understanding a mechanism once is faster than memorising it badly four times.
Do not build a card backlog that outlives the exam
Here is the trap. Generating a deck is easy, so you generate one for all eighteen lectures. At thirty cards each that is 540 new cards the week before an exam, and Anki will still be scheduling them in October. A student on r/medicalschoolanki ignored reviews for two months and came back to 7,000 overdue cards. The debt did not leave when the exam did.
The mechanics are on surviving a review backlog and how many cards a lecture can afford. For this week, the rules are short.
- Import decks only for lectures that survive this exam.
- For everything else, use the practice set or the Story and leave the deck in the library.
- After the exam, suspend the exam-only cards instead of deleting them. You can unsuspend before the final.
- Set new cards per day to a number that fits the week you actually have, not the week you wish you had.
A shape for the last five days
This is a shape, not a timetable. Your ranked list decides the content and your school decides the hours. If you have mandatory sessions until five, each "day" below is an evening.
- 1
Day five
Finish the ranking. Upload the top three lectures. Read the Story for the one you understand least. Take a practice set on one you think you know.
- 2
Day four
Work the next three or four lectures on the list, practice sets first. For every missed question, open the slide the explanation points to and read it properly.
- 3
Day three
Middle-ranked lectures get a fast pass: slides once, then a practice set. Low-ranked lectures get their objectives read and ten minutes each. Nothing more.
- 4
Day two
Retake or re-print the practice sets for the top five lectures. Anything you miss twice goes on a one-page list. That page is your last-day material.
- 5
Day one
The one-page list, the Anki reviews for cards you kept, and sleep. No new lectures.
Start with the highest-weighted lecture
Upload the lecture at the top of your list as a PDF or PowerPoint, up to 100 pages, and pick the one output your decision rule says it needs. What comes back: a Story that explains why each conclusion follows from the mechanism, a practice set of five-option questions each tied to its source slide, or a standard .apkg deck with the source slide image on the back of every card. See how it works and credits and plans.
Then review it against the slides. The generator is instructed to prioritise learning objectives, repeated emphasis and anything the professor checked with a question, but it can miss a detail or put weight on the wrong slide. Check the high-stakes facts against the lecture, especially doses, lab values and staging. These are study aids written from your lecture. They are not NBME or NBOME material and do not replace UWorld or your faculty's question bank.
Questions students ask
Quick answers
How do I know which lectures carry the most exam weight?
Start with the block map or exam blueprint if your school publishes one. If it does not, count the learning objectives, note anything the professor flagged in the lecture, and ask upper years which lecturers write most of the questions. Rank by those and accept the list is a best guess.
Should I skip lectures entirely if I am behind?
Yes, the low-ranked ones. Read their objectives so you know what you are letting go, then leave them until after the exam. A deliberate skip on three lectures beats a shallow pass on all eighteen.
Is it worth making Anki cards a week before the exam?
Only for material that comes back later, on a cumulative final or on boards. For content that dies with this exam, practice questions give you more per hour and leave no review debt behind.
What if I am behind and also do not understand the material?
Take the lecture you understand least and read its Story first, then take a practice set on it. Do not try to memorise cards on a mechanism you cannot explain. That order is slower today and faster by Thursday.
Sources and further reading
- an M1 on r/medicalschool, "M1 already feels like too much"
- an MS1 on r/medicalschool asking how to accept that "the work is never really done"
- a first-year on r/medicalschooluk, "endless amount of lectures"
- a student on r/medicalschoolanki, "7000 reviews behind"
- a dental student on r/DentalSchool, "I have 20 lectures per exam too"
- a dental student on r/DentalSchool, "missing out some key bits which then popped up in exams"
- a PT student on r/PTschool, "somewhere between 35 to 160 slides"
- a nursing student on r/StudentNurse, "How do I know what information is important?"
Exam in a week
Upload the lecture that carries the most questions
Five credits on a new account, no card required. Spend the first one on the lecture at the top of your list, then check what comes back against the slides.