Flashcards and question banks both work, and both expand to fill available time. Run them without a clear division of labour and they will consume the day between them while leaving the actual exam skill under-trained.
What each is good at
Flashcards are for discrete, memorisable items: associations, mechanisms, cutoffs, pathways. Spaced review genuinely improves long-term retention of that kind of material, and nothing else does it as efficiently.
Question banks are for the thing the exam actually asks: reading a clinical presentation, recognising what is happening, and choosing what to do. That skill is not trained by cards, because a card gives you the prompt directly.
Those are different jobs. Problems start when one is used for the other’s work.
The division that works
Questions are the primary activity. Flashcards support them.
Concretely: do your blocks and review them properly. When review turns up a fact you did not know, and could plausibly not know again, that becomes a card. The card exists because of a specific failure you remember.
This keeps the deck small, relevant and directly tied to your gaps.
A bank that already assembles a review queue from your errors covers some of the same ground. QBankly does, which for some students removes the need for a separate deck entirely. It also means the deck grows at a rate set by your actual errors rather than by someone else’s notion of the syllabus.
Why large pre-made decks go wrong
They are comprehensive, which sounds like an advantage and is mostly a scheduling problem. Thousands of cards you did not write, covering material you may already know, at a volume that makes falling behind close to inevitable.
Once you are consistently behind, the queue produces guilt, and guilt produces avoidance. Most abandoned review systems die this way rather than from any doubt about the method.
If you use one, prune it aggressively against what you are actually being examined on, and treat the remainder as optional rather than owed.
The rule when time is short
If something has to give, keep the questions.
Flashcards maintain knowledge. Questions build the skill being tested. A week of cards and no questions leaves you well-retained and under-practised at the thing that decides the result.
Keeping it sustainable
Cap new cards per day at a number you can sustain on a bad day, not a good one. Keep total review under half an hour. Do it before question blocks rather than after, when your attention is intact.
And delete freely. A card for something you now know cold is costing you time for nothing. Pruning is maintenance, not cheating, and a deck nobody prunes eventually becomes a deck nobody opens.
What a good card looks like
One fact, phrased so the answer is unambiguous, in your own words.
Cards that ask for lists are hard to grade honestly and easy to half-remember. Cards copied verbatim from a resource tend to test recognition of the phrasing rather than the fact. Cards covering a whole topic are not cards; they are notes with a delay attached.
If a card is regularly answered “sort of”, it needs splitting or rewriting rather than another repetition.
Reviewing honestly
The system only works if you grade yourself accurately, and the pressure is always toward leniency because a lower grade means seeing the card again sooner.
Half-remembering is not remembering. On the exam there is no partial credit for nearly retrieving something, and a deck full of generously-graded cards produces confidence that does not survive contact with a question.
When to stop using them
Some students find that once their question review is genuinely thorough, the deck adds little. That is a legitimate conclusion rather than a failure.
The test is whether cards are catching things your question review misses. If your error log and your deck contain the same items, you are maintaining two systems for one job, and the questions are the one that also trains reasoning.
A workable default
Twenty new cards a day at most, all generated from your own errors, reviewed before your first question block, with a hard cap of half an hour. Prune monthly.
That setup is small enough to survive a bad week and specific enough to be worth the time, which is more than can be said for most decks.
Frequently asked questions
Can I skip flashcards entirely?
Yes, plenty of people do well without them. They are a retention tool, not a requirement, and question review can carry that load if you do it properly.
How much daily review is too much?
If the queue regularly takes more than about half an hour, or if it is crowding out question blocks, it has grown past its usefulness and needs pruning rather than more time.