Are Anki flashcards associated with higher medical-school exam scores?
Anki users had higher examination scores in one medical-school cohort after adjustment for MCAT scores, but self-selection prevents a causal conclusion.
Source
A Cohort Study Assessing the Impact of Anki as a Spaced Repetition Tool on Academic Performance in Medical School
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Non-randomised cohort comparison; MCAT-adjusted exam-score analyses
- N
- N=130 · 78 ever-users and 52 never-users; exam-specific Anki samples 48, 39, 23 and 10
- Population
- First-year medical students at Boonshoft School of Medicine, class of 2025
- Outcome
- Three course-end examinations and an end-of-year basic-science assessment
- Comparison
- Anki users for each exam versus students who never used Anki, adjusting for MCAT
- Test delay
- Course-end and end-of-year exams; no fixed item-to-test retention interval
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Inspect source passages
Are Anki flashcards associated with higher medical-school exam scores?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
Who participated and how large was the analysed sample?
Of the 130 students from the BSOM Class of 2025, 78 (60.0%) used Anki for at least one exam.
What is the main limit on applying this result?
Although a number of Anki user statistics were correlated with exam scores in the bivariate correlations, none were independently associated with exam scores for Course I, Course III, and the CBSE in the regression models.
What they did
The study followed a class of 130 first-year medical students at Boonshoft School of Medicine. Seventy-eight used Anki for at least one exam and 52 never used it. The researchers linked course and end-of-year exam scores, MCAT percentiles, surveys, and submitted Anki statistics. For each exam, students using Anki for that exam were compared with never-users, with MCAT included as a covariate; participation was not randomly assigned.
What they found
Anki users scored higher on all four examined assessments after MCAT adjustment. Usage statistics did not provide a consistent recipe for success across exams. The Anki subgroup shrank from 48 for the first course to 10 for the end-of-year assessment, and users had higher baseline MCAT scores overall. This is evidence of an association between flashcard use and exam performance, not proof that the app caused the difference.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Motivation, other resources, study time and survey-response selection may explain part of the association despite MCAT adjustment. It was a single institution with small later subgroups. Exams were course-end and year-end assessments rather than equal-delay retention tests. The study does not validate a specific daily card count, scheduling algorithm, or transfer to clinical care; it also does not evaluate PaperFren or NoteFren.
Key terms
- Retention interval
- The time between the last learning opportunity and the outcome test.
- Comparison condition
- The alternative study activity or exposure against which a result is assessed.
- Generalisation
- Whether a result applies to other populations, materials, settings or outcomes.
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Which comparison was used in this study?
Common questions
Do flashcards improve exam performance?
This cohort found higher scores among Anki users, but cannot establish that flashcards caused the difference.
How many cards should I study each day?
This study did not establish a reliable daily card-count target across examinations.
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