How to study
Studying in Medkit is simple: you see the question, try to answer it in your head, and then reveal the solution to rate yourself. That decides when the card comes back.
Starting a study session
There are three ways to start:
- From the dashboard, with the Continue studying button. It builds a single session with cards from all your decks until you hit your daily goal.
- With the deck's Study button, in Decks.
- With the Study button inside View cards, the screen listing a deck's cards (you get there by tapping the deck, or from its three-dot menu).
On a deck with subdecks that button builds a single session with the cards from all of them, because cards always live in the subdecks.
Before starting that session you also choose which kind of card gets in: that is covered in What you want to study, below.
What you want to study
When you study a deck with its subdecks, the dialog lets you choose what the session is built from:
- Standard: the usual order. Pending reviews first, by priority, and if there is room it fills up with new cards.
- New: only cards you have never studied, no reviews.
- Reviews: only cards you have already studied and are due to see again, without adding new material.
The mode picks which kind of card gets in, not how many. If you have Always show total pending turned off, your daily goal's cap applies in all three modes: what changes is that the whole cap is spent on the kind you chose.
What a session looks like
Medkit shows you cards one at a time. First you see the question. Once you have thought of the answer, you reveal it and the solution appears along with the buttons to rate it.
The order is not random: cards you were already learning and cards that are due come first, then the new ones. Why one card comes up before another, and what being due means, is in Spaced repetition. A card you rate Again does not come back within the same session: it waits for the interval it was given. If you'd rather see it again before the session ends, turn on Repeat "Again" at the end of the session in Study preferences.
Rating the card
After revealing the answer, you pick one of four options based on how it went. That tells Medkit when to show it to you again.
There is no need to hunt for the perfect option. Answer honestly and the algorithm adjusts on its own over time.
Taking a card out of the session
Below the card, between Edit card and Details, sits Take out of the session. Inside it live the three ways to stop seeing a card: one is momentary and the other two last until you undo them.
Skip (or the S key) moves to the next card without rating it. It's for when you don't want to study that card right now: you got distracted, it got late, or you'd rather move on.
It's not for when you don't know the answer. If you drew a blank, reveal it anyway and rate Again. That's what tells Medkit to show it to you soon. Skipping it only leaves it for later, exactly as hard as it was.
Skipping tells the algorithm nothing. The card stays exactly as it was: still pending, it comes back in your next session, neither earlier nor later than it was due, and it doesn't reappear in the current one. When you close the session, the summary screen tells you how many you skipped.
You can skip before or after revealing the answer. On Multiple choice cards, only before choosing: once you choose, the card is already rated and the button is disabled.
The other two in the menu aren't momentary:
- Ignore this part: takes the part you're looking at out of your studying and leaves the rest of the card active. It only shows up on cards that have several parts.
- Hide card: takes the whole card out of your studying and out of your list.
Those two ask for confirmation and move on to the next card, because both really do take something out of your studying, not just out of this session. You reverse them from View cards whenever you want, and how they work is in Stuck, hidden, and ignored cards.
The Details panel
Next to Take out of the session sits Details. It opens a panel with the record of the card in front of you, without breaking the session.
At the top it tells you the card's Location, meaning which deck it lives in, and how you're doing in the Session. At the very bottom, under Help, you get the keyboard shortcuts and a refresher on how spaced repetition works.
In between, under Action, is Mark for review: it leaves a bookmark on the card so you can come back later. The card still comes up when you study and the algorithm never hears about it, and that's why it lives here and not in Take out of the session: it just becomes easy to find in View cards. You take it off with Remove mark, and how marks are used is in marking a card to review it.
At the foot of the panel there's one more action: Email this card to me.
Keyboard shortcuts
On a computer you can study without touching the mouse. This is the full list, and you also have it at hand during the session, in the Details panel.
The 1 to 4 keys do two different things depending on the card type. On Multiple choice they pick the answer, so they don't rate there: those cards rate themselves.
When you finish
When no pending cards are left, the session ends and Medkit records how much you studied. That feeds your streak and your statistics.
The summary screen shows you the session recap:
- Correct answers: what percentage of your reviews you got right. Only cards you had already learned that came back on their due date count, because new and learning cards don't measure memory yet. If you only studied those, the ring stays empty. Again is the only miss, Hard already counts as correct.
- Correct answers per session: how you're doing in this deck, session by session, with today's highlighted and your history as a reference line. It fills in as cards come back: until you review some, it tells you what's missing.
- When they come back: the cards you just studied, spread out by how you rated them across bands that keep getting longer: today, tomorrow, 2 to 7 days, 1 to 4 weeks, 1 to 6 months, and more than 6 months. The bands grow because the intervals grow, so as things settle your cards move down: most of them landing in the last two is the sign that you've mastered that material.
- Pace: how many cards you rated, how long it took, and how long each one took on average. If you skipped any, it says so at the bottom: those don't count as studied and come back in your next session.
- How you rated: how many times you used each button.
If the session spanned several decks (a deck with its subdecks, or Continue studying from the dashboard, which pulls cards from all your decks), a selector appears above the recap to see the data for one specific deck or for all decks together. The whole recap is recalculated for whatever you pick.
The one part that always needs a deck selected is Correct answers per session: your history is kept deck by deck, so there is no series that combines them all. Pick a deck in the selector to see its own.
If the deck you studied is a copy of a public one and you have not changed anything in it, on the third session you get who made it and a heart to leave a like at the bottom. It goes to the original deck, not to your copy, and it is offered once: if you skip it, it does not ask again.