How I cheated at university

If you’re from an European country like I am, you probably also got to enjoy quite extensive general education. With some specialisation in mechanical engineering I spent a total of 14 years of my life in school. However, in those 14 years, I never once bothered looking for my ideal study technique. This is something that scared me a lot when I started my bachelor’s programme at the age of 27, because I knew I would struggle when the exams would roll around.

And struggle I did! I listened attentively during the lessons, I pored over the slides of my profs and researched topics I especially struggled with in more detail, but nothing would stick. My adult brain just couldn’t save all this new information. I consulted with my girlfriend at the time and she suggested I should sum up the contents and write questions about them to test my knowledge.

The right idea

This suggestion by my girlfriend saved me during the exam period of the first semester. I summed up the content of all my courses and wrote my own questions about it. Just processing the exam material into one comprehensive document helped me a lot in getting a general understanding of the topic. But by the time I wrote the last page of the summary, a few days had passed and I’d have already forgotten the first chapters. Then I would ask my lovely girlfriend to test me, once I figured I’d have gotten a good grasp of the course material, but I always struggled with some questions, and never would really get them right.

The process of summarising the material and then testing my knowledge was already quite close to my ideal solution. I just needed the correct suggestion.

The cheat: Spaced repetition with flashcards

Discovering Anki

During my bachelor’s programme a colleague made a great suggestion that helped me study smarter: Anki

Some absolutely wonderful people figured that learning is something that benefits humanity and published a free and open-source flashcard app, that also offers free synchronisation over multiple devices. Anki lets you use various flashcard formats or define your own, but for my purposes I was fine using the most basic format. This format has a “Front” side with the prompt and a “Back” side with the solution. My cards looked something like the image below.

These cards are always assigned to a deck and can also be assigned tags, to get them organised more easily. I would always create a deck for each course, and assign the course and corresponding chapter as tag, so I could move the card between decks but never end up losing it. Decks can also be grouped, so I ended up with a list of decks like the one below.

Understanding Spaced repetition

Now I’ve talked a lot about Anki, but I never once explained what spaced repetition actually is. Take a look at the image below - credit goes to Zirguezi, Wikimedia.

What you see here is the Leitner system, where flashcards you can answer correctly are advanced to a box which you review less than the earlier one, but if you ever answer one wrong, it gets put back into the first box. This a very practical system to use with physical flashcards and illustrates what spaced repetition is all about. Basically, in spaced repetition, you just keep repeating flashcards, let’s say daily, until you manage to answer them once or twice, and then you change the interval to a longer time period. So the flashcard you just answered correctly might just be necessary to review again in 3 days time instead of the following day.

An app like Anki manages this for you, and lets you set the system with the corresponding weights you may want. I think spaced repetition is a great tool to easily memorise large amounts of knowledge in very sensible time periods.

But I’m a student! I’m by far not disciplined enough to start studying a month in advance, to really take advantage of a spaced repetition system.

The Allmer system

The smart suggestions ended above this heading of the blog post. In the six semesters I spent in my bachelor’s programme, I managed to get straight A’s by usually starting to study two weeks in advance, incorporating on average five days I spent on reviewing flashcards. I managed to optimise this process each semester, reaching quite a great pace of summarising content and then generating flashcards from the summary directly.

If you want to try my approach, you can follow these steps:

1. Write a summary of whatever you want to study. Summarise each chapter.
2. Make sure you can easily write questions and answers for each chapter, that cover the content you want to learn.
3. Create flashcards and tag them per chapter. Keep in mind some rules:
   • Each flashcard should only have one question.
   • If the answer is a list, make sure there are no more than five items.
   • You should be able to answer the flashcard in less than 20-30 seconds.
4. Spend at least 5 days studying, structure them as follows:
   • First two days: Read each card out loud and really focus while doing so.
   • Third day: Answer the flashcards and only advance them when you get at least 50% correct.
   • Fourth day: Answer the flashcards and only advance them when you get at least 75% correct.
   • Last day: Answer the flashcards and only advance them when you get them 100% correct.

The day of the exam, or whatever the event of your due date is, you should not review the cards anymore. Get a good night’s rest before and show off what you learned at peak performance.

Regarding tools I use Anki to write the cards and AnkiDroid to review them, because I feel it’s more comfortable to do so while walking around or sitting somewhere comfortable.

Closing words

I know, claiming that studying is cheating is a bit cheap. But to me it sure felt like cheating, because by finding my perfect system, I managed to master my bachelor’s programme with relative ease (and some blood, sweat and tears). If you want to know more, feel free to get in touch via my socials or leave a comment.

The observant reader will have noticed that I actually don’t write my flashcards manually anymore. I actually found a great way to generate them from my notes, by using a plugin in Obsidian. How I do that will be the topic of one of my next posts, so stay tuned!