Term starts in three weeks and the entire course is one PDF. Last time I tried this I made cards straight from my highlights, ended up with roughly 2,000 sentences with a word missing, and abandoned the deck by week six. What is the workflow that actually survives a term - cards only after lectures, cards only from practice questions, or is there a sane way to work from the PDF itself?
Some arithmetic before you start, because it is what stopped me repeating your mistake. Good cards take me two to four minutes each including the moment of working out what the question actually is, so a hundred cards is a genuine evening's work. At that rate a 300 page book cannot become a deck without eating the term - which is the argument for making cards downstream of practice, where the question already exists and you only have to type it.
I ran both approaches across two terms of the same kind of material. Term one: cards from the reading, huge deck, high review load, mediocre exam. Term two: cards only from problems I got wrong plus a small set of definitions I kept confusing, deck about a fifth the size, better exam and far less time. The small deck also stayed alive because it never felt like a debt.
A deck that feels like a debt is the actual failure mode, more than card quality. Once the count is scary you stop opening it, and everything in it is worth zero.
Partial disagreement: for a fact-dense course with a standard curriculum, take a well-reviewed pre-made deck, suspend everything not on your syllabus, and add your own cards for the gaps. You get somebody else's hundreds of hours of card writing for free. It works badly for anything conceptual and brilliantly for terminology and classification.
My version of your 2,000 card disaster was cloze deleting whole sentences from lecture slides. It felt productive and the cards only worked because I recognised the shape of the sentence, which the exam did not provide. I now write the question and the answer on separate days so I cannot lean on the phrasing.
@indent_error_ivy · last mo. · 2 replies
Never make cards from the text. Make them from questions you got wrong, from problems you had to look something up for, and from things you tried to explain and could not. The PDF is the source you go back to when a card fails, not the thing you convert. Two thousand highlight cards is what happens when you outsource the thinking to a highlighter.
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@interval_ida · last mo.
The rule that fixed this for me: a card only gets made after I have already failed to recall the thing once, in the wild. If I have never failed at it, it is not a card, it is a note.
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