Flashcard Prompt for Exam Prep

What this prompt does

A flashcard prompt converts source material into question-and-answer pairs that each test exactly one fact, formatted so a spaced-repetition app imports them without you repairing every line by hand. Paste a chapter, a lecture transcript, or three weeks of messy notes. Back come the cards, cloze versions of anything that has to be memorised word-for-word, and a separate pile of the ones you're most likely to forget first.

Ten study techniques were reviewed by Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham in 2013, and the two rated high utility were practice testing and distributed practice. Rereading, underlining and mnemonic devices all came out low. Their report for the Association for Psychological Science is why this page exists separately from a study guide: a guide is a document you reread, and rereading landed on the wrong list.

Generating cards is the easy half. Generating cards small enough to be worth reviewing is where most decks fall apart, so the rules below do most of the work.

The prompt

Make flashcards from the source material below. Follow every rule.

**Source material:** [PASTE THE CHAPTER, LECTURE TRANSCRIPT, OR NOTES]
**Subject and level:** [e.g. "second-year undergraduate pharmacology"]
**How I'm being tested:** [MULTIPLE CHOICE / SHORT ANSWER / ORAL VIVA / PRACTICAL]
**What I already know cold:** [TOPICS TO SKIP, or "nothing"]
**How many cards:** [NUMBER, or "as many as the material justifies, no padding"]

Rules for every card:

1. One fact per card. If an answer contains "and", a comma-separated list, or two clauses, split it into separate cards. An answer running past about 15 words is too big.
2. The question must stand alone. Someone who has never seen my source should be able to read it and know what's being asked. No "What are the three types listed above?"
3. No card whose answer is yes or no.
4. For definitions, write both directions: term to definition, and definition to term.
5. For anything that must be recalled verbatim — formulas, dates, sequences, drug names — add a cloze version with the key element replaced by [...].
6. Keep my source's wording where it's precise. Do not paraphrase technical terms into approximations.

Return three sections:

**A. Cards.** One per line, semicolon-separated: question;answer;tag. The tag is the topic in lowercase with no spaces. If a question or answer itself contains a semicolon, wrap that field in double quotes.

**B. Hard pile.** The 5 to 8 cards from section A most likely to be forgotten first, with one line each on why: ambiguous wording, a near-identical sibling card, or an arbitrary detail with nothing to hook it to.

**C. What I left out.** Anything in the source that doesn't survive the card format, and why it doesn't. Do not convert it into cards anyway.

Use only what I gave you. Do not add facts from your own knowledge. If my source contradicts itself, make a card for neither version and flag it in section C.

How to use it

1. Paste more source than feels necessary. A model given one paragraph invents context to fill the gaps; given eight pages it starts discarding, which is what you want. Discarding is the skill you're buying.
2. Read section C before section A. What it refused to card is the honest part of the output — diagrams, arguments, anything that only means something in sequence. That list tells you what still needs a different kind of study.
3. Save section A as plain text. Anki imports a plain text file whose fields are separated by commas, semicolons or tabs, works out the field count from the first non-commented line, and expects the file in UTF-8; the import documentation also covers quoting a field that contains the separator. Save it as .txt. A .docx won't import.
4. Keep the hard pile in front of you for the first three days. Those cards are where the review time actually goes, and seeing them flagged before you've failed them once changes how you read them.
5. Delete freely. A deck you resent is a deck you stop opening. Cutting a third of the cards in week one is normal and costs you almost nothing.

The one-fact rule isn't fussiness. SuperMemo's Piotr Wozniak calls it the minimum information principle, and his argument is about scheduling rather than tidiness: split a two-part item and each half gets reviewed at its own pace, so you stop dragging the easy half back every time the hard half slips.

Example output (partial)

Source: two pages of undergraduate cardiology notes. Tested by: short answer.

A. Cards

Normal resting heart rate range in a healthy adult;60-100 beats per minute;vitals
Which node initiates the normal cardiac impulse?;The sinoatrial node;conduction
The sinoatrial node is located in which chamber?;The right atrium;conduction
Under the Frank-Starling law, what rises as end-diastolic volume rises?;Stroke volume;physiology
The [...] node delays the impulse before it reaches the ventricles;atrioventricular;conduction

B. Hard pile

• Sinoatrial location and atrioventricular delay — near-identical siblings. Both read as "a node in the heart" until you've seen them a dozen times. Schedule them on different days.
• 60-100 bpm — an arbitrary range with nothing to hook it to. Give it one: 60 is a beat a second.

C. What I left out

The two paragraphs on the pressure-volume loop. That's a shape you read, not a fact you state in 15 words, and a card asking you to describe it would test your patience instead of your memory. Draw it from blank paper twice a week instead. Separately, your notes give the ejection fraction formula twice with different denominators, so I've made no card for either until you check which one is right.

That last line is the whole reason for section C. Two contradictory formulas in your own notes is the sort of thing that survives a term of rereading and gets found in an exam hall.

Variations

For vocabulary in a new language

"Add a third and fourth card for each word: one that asks for the word in a sentence, one that asks for the gender or classifier. Put the example sentence in the answer field, not the question."

For a practical or clinical exam

"Rewrite the questions as things I'd be asked while doing the task, not while sitting at a desk. Where a step has an order, make one card per step and one card for the sequence as a whole."

When you already have a deck

"Here are the fronts of my existing cards. Make cards only for material my deck doesn't cover, and list any of my existing cards the source contradicts."

Common pitfalls

• Don't ask for 200 cards from four pages. Given a number it can't reach honestly, a model pads with trivia and near-duplicates, and you'll spend February reviewing the padding. Ask for what the material justifies.
• Don't let the deck decide what matters. It weights whatever your source spent the most words on, which is not always what gets examined. Cross-check the tags against the syllabus before you import.
• Don't skip the file preview on import. A stray unquoted semicolon shifts every field on that line, and a deck with 40 scrambled cards is worse than no deck.
• Try instead: run the prompt, then write five cards yourself from the same source before you look at section A. The ones you wrote and it missed tell you what your notes were unclear about.

ChatGPT and Claude both hold the semicolon format across long outputs. Gemini tends to re-add prose headings between card blocks, so add "section A must contain nothing but card lines" if you're pasting straight into a file. All three drift toward longer answers as the output runs on — the 15-word ceiling in the rules is what pulls them back.

Who uses this prompt

• Students: turning a term of lecture notes into something testable in the fortnight before finals. The full set is in prompts for students.
• Nurses: drug names, dosing rules and protocol sequences, which are exactly the arbitrary detail cloze cards handle best. See prompts for nurses.
• Teachers: building a shared class deck, and reading section C as a list of what needs to be taught rather than memorised. More in prompts for teachers.

The tell that it worked is section C being longer than you expected. A source that converts cleanly into cards, all of it, usually means the cards are too big.