You have a page of notes and twenty minutes. Here is which lines are worth a card, which are not, and how to catch the three bad cards that will waste a week of your reviews.
Making cards from notes isn’t the same as typing your notes into an app. If it were, the app could do it for you, and you’d end up with a huge set that doesn’t help. Most of a page doesn’t deserve a card. The skill is picking the lines that do.
Here’s how to work down one page in a single pass.
A line earns a card if it has an answer somebody could ask you for. Three kinds of line pass that test.
Things with an exact answer. Definitions, formulas, units, dates, vocabulary, names, the value of a constant. If the right answer is a specific string of words, and you’d either have it or you wouldn’t, that’s a card.
Things that get confused with each other. Mitosis and meiosis. Affect and effect. Ser and estar. These cost you real points. Write the card as a contrast. “Which one keeps the chromosome number the same?” beats two definitions that each look right on their own.
Things your teacher said twice. Anything repeated, or said out loud and then written on the board, is a teacher telling you what’s on the test. Mark those in class. You can’t hear the emphasis a week later.
Sentences that only join two other sentences. “We then looked at how this applies to gases.” Nobody is going to ask you that.
Examples that were there to explain the rule. The rule is the card. The example was scaffolding. There’s one exception. Sometimes the example itself is the thing you get asked about, and that happens in history and English and almost nowhere else.
Things you already know cold. Twenty cards you keep missing is a good week. Twenty you answer on sight is a week of pressing a button.
Your notes are full of these. A person talking packs three things into one sentence, and you wrote it down the way they said it. A card with two facts on the back can’t be marked right or wrong. It teaches you nothing either way. So split it.
Three cards, each answerable in a few words. Here’s the test for a finished split. Read the front and ask whether you could get half of it right. If you could, split again.
Lists are where sets go bad. A card saying “name the seven diatomic elements” is one you keep failing. Miss any single element and the whole answer is wrong. You still don’t know which bit is weak.
Pick one of two ways.
If the list has an order you need, like the stages of mitosis or the steps of a titration, card the joints instead of the whole chain. “What comes after metaphase?” “What happens during anaphase?” Know every joint and you know the list.
If the order doesn’t matter, like causes or symptoms or properties, make one card per item. Phrase each one so the item is the answer. Then add a card for the count. “How many named causes of the French Revolution are in our notes?” is worth having, because on the test it tells you when to stop writing.
Keep a whole-list card in one case only. The test is going to ask for the whole list, so that card is the test.
A labelled diagram is two different sets of cards. People only make the first one.
The first is where things are. You get the picture and you name the part. That’s hard to do with text cards. “The structure between the trachea and the alveoli” describes a position, and what you want is a memory of one. So build these cards on the image itself, with a spot on the picture to find. It’s why Machi.study has a diagram set at all, and a scan of your own labelled sketch works as well as a textbook figure.
The second is what things do. Those are ordinary text cards written straight off the diagram. “What does the loop of Henle do?” “Which part of the neuron receives signals?” The function cards usually carry more points than the labels.
One formula is at least three cards. The one everybody writes is the weakest.
Knowing that a formula exists and being able to use it are different things. The second one is what gets marked. Cards still can’t replace working problems. They’re for the facts a problem needs.
Most dates aren’t the fact. The fact is what happened, and the year is a label on it. So write the card in the direction you’ll be asked. For almost every history class, that means the event goes first.
Add the reverse card only when the year itself is a cue you’ll get. A timeline question does that. So does a document dated 1964 that you have to place. Otherwise a year on the front of a card is a riddle, because a lot of things happened in 1964.
A teacher’s deck is easier than handwritten notes, because somebody already split it up for you. Turn each slide title into a question and the bullets into answers, one card per bullet. Skip the agenda and objectives slides. If a slide has eight bullets, that’s a list, so go back up a section.
A textbook chapter is harder. The mistake is opening to page one and making cards as you read. You end up with forty cards from the first three pages and none from the last ten.
Read the section first, at normal speed. Then close it and make cards from what you remember, plus the bold terms and the end-of-section review questions. Those questions were written by people who know what the chapter was about. They’re often card fronts word for word.
You made thirty cards fast. Before you study them, look for three specific failures. Each one costs you the same review time as a good card and gives you nothing back.
One: the card with no question on it. Read only the fronts. Stop at any front where you can’t tell what kind of answer it wants: a word, a number, a list, a year. A front reading “Enlightenment” fails straight away. Rewrite it as a question.
Two: the card with two right answers. Now read only the backs. Ask whether each back is the only thing that could have been said. If one back is “increases the rate”, there are probably four cards in the set with that same back. You’ll mark yourself right on all of them without knowing which is which.
Three: the card you copied and don’t understand. This is the expensive one. Find any back you couldn’t explain to a friend right now. You’ll learn the shape of that sentence, produce it on demand, and still not know the thing. That’s the worst outcome there is. Rewrite it in your own words, or go find out what it means.
Cut or fix those and the set is ready. Thirty good cards beats the two hundred you’d have had if you’d typed the page.
Next: the card-writing rules in full in how to write flashcards that work. Or if the test is close and this sounds like a lot, what to do when tonight is all you have.