IB survival · 4 min read
Anki for IB: a flashcard setup that survives Year 2
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I used Anki through the IB and I still use it in medical school. I recommend it to almost every student I tutor. This is the setup I give them, including the mistakes that make people quit after two weeks.
Why spaced repetition works
Two findings from learning research do most of the work here:
- Testing yourself beats rereading. Retrieving something from memory strengthens it far more than looking at it again (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). A large review of study techniques rated practice testing as one of only two "high utility" methods. Rereading and highlighting were rated low (Dunlosky et al., 2013).
- Spacing beats cramming. The same study time spread across days and weeks gives much better long-term memory than one long session (Cepeda et al., 2006).
Anki does both. It shows you a card, you try to answer before flipping it, and the algorithm decides when you see it again. Cards you know come back rarely. Cards you miss come back soon. Do a bit every day, and in three months you're far ahead of where cramming would get you.
What it costs
- Desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux): free.
- Android (AnkiDroid): free.
- iPhone/iPad (AnkiMobile): a one-off paid app (the price depends on your country). That money funds Anki's development.
- AnkiWeb sync: free. It keeps your decks the same across devices.
If you only have an iPhone and don't want to pay, use the desktop app for reviews and accept that you'll review at your desk.
The setup
One deck per subject. Don't make one deck per topic. Anki works best when topics are mixed in a review session, which is also how the exam mixes them. Use tags for topics instead (for example B2.1 or topic-stoichiometry), so you can still find and filter cards.
New cards per day: start at 10–20. This is the setting that kills most students. Every new card creates future reviews, so 100 new cards today means a mountain of reviews next week. Twenty new cards a day is about 600 a month, which is plenty.
Scheduler. Recent Anki versions offer a newer scheduler called FSRS, which you can switch on in the deck options. It's well regarded. The older default also works fine. What matters is that you review every day.
Daily time: 15–20 minutes. If your reviews regularly take longer than 30 minutes, add fewer new cards. Don't skip days.
What to put on cards
Definitions: the rucksack test
A good definition names the category and then the feature that makes it different. "A rucksack is a bag made for your back." Apply that to every definition card:
- Front: Osmosis
- Back: Diffusion of water (category) across a partially permeable membrane (difference).
If your answer is an example instead of a definition ("osmosis is like when a raisin swells"), the card is wrong. That's also a common way to lose the mark in the exam.
Decision cards
These are the cards most students never make, and they're worth the most. They train you to choose the right method fast:
- Front: Ecology IA, the variable changes with distance from a river. Transect or random quadrats? Back: Transect along the gradient.
- Front: Right triangle, hypotenuse not involved. Which ratio? Back: tan.
- Front: Command term "evaluate". What does the examiner want? Back: Strengths and limitations weighed up, then a judgement.
Diagrams
Anki has a built-in image occlusion tool. You put boxes over the labels of a diagram and get tested on each one. Use it for cell structures, the heart, the nephron, neurons, and anything you'd be asked to label or annotate.
Psychology studies
Use one card per study per point it supports: "Which study supports the link between [hormone] and [behaviour]? Aim and finding in one line." Don't put an entire study summary on one card.
The three ways people break Anki
- Copying whole paragraphs onto cards. If the back has three facts, make three cards.
- Adding too many new cards. See above. The review pile grows quietly, then one day it's 400 cards and you quit.
- Using Anki instead of practice questions. Flashcards make sure you know the facts. They don't train you to apply them to an unseen data set, which is what Paper 1B and Paper 2 ask for. You need both.
If you keep forgetting the same cards, that is usually a sign the card tests a fact you never really understood. The Biology mistakes and Chemistry mistakes guides are a good source of cards worth making: each one is a confusion examiners see every year.
Flashcards vs exam questions
I use this split with students:
| Item | Flashcards | Exam-style questions |
|---|---|---|
| Trains | Recall of facts, terms, definitions, diagrams | Applying knowledge to new situations, data, command terms |
| When | Every day, 15–20 min | Every day, a handful, with the reason said out loud |
| Tells you | What you've forgotten | Whether you can earn the marks |
The exam-question half is what I built Heptavo for: questions climbing from recall to exam level, with a mark scheme after each answer. Use whatever question source you like, as long as both halves happen daily.
Should you use pre-made decks?
Shared decks are fine for vocabulary-heavy material, but be careful. Many IB decks online are still built on the old syllabus: Biology and Chemistry changed for exams from 2025. Making your own cards also counts as studying, because writing a good card forces you to understand the idea. If you use someone else's deck, delete cards you don't understand rather than memorising them.
Sources
- Roediger, H. L. & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
- Cepeda, N. J. et al. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
- Dunlosky, J. et al. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
- Anki: apps.ankiweb.net and the Anki manual on deck options.