What makes a good flashcard

If flashcards are not working for you, the cause is usually not discipline and not the app. It is the cards. A badly written card cannot be reviewed well no matter how faithfully you show up, and most people write the same four things wrong.

One fact per card

The highest-yield rule, and the most broken.

A card that asks for five things cannot be graded. You got three — is that a pass? Since you cannot say, your rating is arbitrary, and from then on the scheduler is working from noise: it returns cards you knew and retires cards you did not.

Bad:

Front: Causes of heart failure
Back: ischaemia, hypertension, valvular disease, cardiomyopathy, arrhythmia

Better: five cards, or one per mechanism, each with an answer that is right or wrong without argument.

Ask a question, do not state a topic

A card is a retrieval test. If the front is a heading, you are not retrieving anything — you are recognising a topic and reciting whatever you remember near it.

Bad: The forgetting curve. Good: What does the forgetting curve predict about how much you retain 24 hours after first studying something?

Allow exactly one answer

If the front suggests three reasonable answers and only one counts, the card is wrong, not you. Put the thing that narrows it into the question: the context, the units, the year, the author.

Write it in your own words

Copying the sentence from your source produces cards that test whether you recognise that sentence. The exam will phrase it differently and you will recognise it less. Rephrasing as you write is also the study — it is where you find out whether you understood it.

Answerable in a few seconds

If it takes more than about ten seconds, the card is usually asking for several things. Split it. Short cards are the ones that actually get reviewed on bad days, and bad days decide whether the habit survives.

Separate what to memorise from what to understand

Flashcards are excellent for isolated facts and fairly poor for extended reasoning. A six-step process does not memorise well as a six-item card; it is understood by reading, and then the specific points where your memory fails get pinned down with cards.

If you catch yourself making cards for something you do not understand, stop. No card fixes that, and memorising without understanding produces answers you cannot use.

Record where it came from

In two months you will look at a card without remembering which lecture it came from or why it mattered, and at that point you cannot check it. Anki has a Source field for this; any decent tool should give you an equivalent. It is covered properly in where did this flashcard come from?.

Delete without guilt

A card that is not earning its place costs you reviews every week. Deleting is a perfectly healthy scheduling decision. If a card has taught you nothing for months, it has already told you what it was worth.

Where Quat fits

Quat is an iPhone and iPad app I make, so this part is an interested party talking.

Quat generates a first draft of cards from what you capture — a recorded lecture, a photo of a page, a link, a PDF — and that draft is subject to every rule above. A model tends to produce long cards carrying several facts, so the pruning is yours, and it is the part that makes them good: cards are editable and deletable from the Cards tab, and the time to do it is the same day, while the source is still fresh.

What it does handle by default is the provenance point: every card prints how it came in, the date, and the note it came from, so rewriting a weak card months later is possible rather than guesswork.

What it does not do is judge whether a card is well written. That is still your call, and it is the one thing on this page no tool is going to take off your hands.