How to flashcard
This guide is meant to summarize some specific steps that one can take to effectively flashcard for quiz bowl.
Flashcarding is only one facet of studying - for a broad overview of approach, see How to study and read the guides in the "Study" page.
Overview
There are only a few steps involved in effective flashcarding (henceforth referred to as "carding"). In order of importance, they are:
- 1. [[How to flashcard#Reviewing cards with regularity|]]
- 2. [[How to flashcard#Creating new cards|]]
- 3. [[How to flashcard#Amending old cards|]]
There is also a zero-th step, which is "Obtaining a carding program." This guide will touch on each, but in chronological order.
Many other players have described their personal preferences with carding - you will likely find many of their insights productive to read through. A few are listed here:
- So You Want to Study Quizbowl - the classic guide by Max Schindler
- Re: Help studying by AGoodMan - advice from Jon Suh
Obtaining a carding program
For many players, the first experience they will have had with flashcards is something they wrote on physical index cards to remember vocabulary words or key terms for one of their classes. Even this rudimentary system is very effective, but its most significant drawback is that it does not scale. As the number of cards increases, the overhead of keeping them organized grows enormously. Quizlet, probably the best-known flashcarding software, allows the creation of digital questions on their website. This solves some of the organizational issues and many players may have started with this instead of physical cards. Both of these will suffice but suffer from the subtle issue that reviewing in order is not as effective as reviewing randomly, and both are less effective than an intelligent spacing.
For this reason, most players will recommend a software that makes use of "spaced repetition". This is a family of algorithms that decide to will delay showing you specific cards that you previously performed well on. There are two major programs which are used for this purpose:
| Anki | Mnemosyne |
|---|---|
|
|
| Shared features | |
| |
It is strongly recommended that you download one of these programs before you start seriously carding.
Downloading either of these free programs takes seconds on a typical internet connection. They are both perfectly acceptable choices - I (Kevin Wang) used Mnemosyne while I was in high school and switched to Anki in college, which I still use today. I would say that the only significant difference is that Anki has an iOS app - $25 well spent.
Creating new flashcards
The main goal of carding is to retain pieces of information. This begs the question of "where do these pieces of information come from?"
Typically, carding is a single, typically late, step of a studying pipeline. Clues are obtained from various sources, including packets or reference materials like textbooks, before being written down and eventually converted into flashcards.
It is possible to inherit a deck of cards (from a teammate, from a competitor, from online). You are certainly welcome to use these, but I caution you - the process of creating flashcards can be as significant for retention as reviewing them. It is very hard to beat someone to a fact with a card that they made.