Anki app for medical studies: Ankizin and AnKing on the iPhone

Six years and three months of regular study time, 5,500 hours according to the Approbationsordnung, and at the end of the clinical phase 320 questions across three examination days. Nobody has counted how many individual facts sit behind that, not even the IMPP. One thing is certain: without a system that reminds you of what you have forgotten, you will end up learning much of medical school twice.

Many people solve this with Anki. This page shows how to study the well-known medical decks with checkst on iPhone, how to make cards from lecture slides without card-making eating your study time, and where checkst does not help.

Still in the preclinical phase? Then read checkst for the Physikum first.

The degree in one paragraph

Regular course: two years of preclinical study, the Physikum, three years of clinical study, then the M2. This is followed by the Practical Year with three blocks of 16 weeks each, and finally the oral-practical M3. Model degree programmes differ from this. What can come up in the written examination is specified by the IMPP in the GK2 subject catalogue.

Classic M2 preparation runs through question banks: AMBOSS recommends roughly half a day of reading and half a day of question practice in its 100-day study plan, with practice exams from day 86. Thieme via medici also offers a 100-day plan for the M2. Anki does not replace this. Anki makes sure that material from the fifth semester is still there in the tenth.

Which decks German medical students use

• Ankizin: a student clinical deck based on the AMBOSS library and the 100-day study plan, currently in version 5 according to the project page.
• Ankiphil: the Physikum deck from the same project environment.
• HistoHal and Dellas × AMBOSS: a histology deck and a pharmacology deck, also linked from the Ankizin page.
• Student-council decks: The AG Anki of the Freiburg student council organises shared decks for local exams. Elsewhere, senior students pass their decks on.
• AnKing Step Deck: built for Step 1, Step 2 and US rotations. Some individual students in Germany use it, but it is not designed for the German examination.

To be honest: on Reddit, Ankizin is also described as overloaded, with nested lists that take a long time to click through. The project team counters that the deck deliberately includes fundamentals beyond the narrow M2 focus. For you, this means not unlocking everything that is in the deck.

Your workflow with checkst

1. Import a deck. Download the .apkg on a Mac or PC or export your existing Anki deck, send it to your iPhone and open it in checkst. Note types, media, cloze deletions and image occlusion cards come along, and so does your study progress if you exported it with the deck. A freshly loaded deck is studied from the beginning anyway; if a file brings someone else's study history, reset it during import. What does not come along: automatic updates. For this, Ankizin currently promotes AnkiCollab, older versions ran through AnkiHub. Both are Anki tools, and checkst cannot use them.

2. Set the target retention. checkst plans with FSRS. Target retention is the probability that you still know a card on its due date. The Anki manual gives 90 percent as the default; above that, daily reviews rise quickly, and from 97 percent the manual says it becomes overwhelming. And if you did not know the answer: press "Again", not "Hard". FSRS counts "Hard" as a success.

3. Throttle new cards before the backlog arrives. On r/medicalschoolanki, someone describes that clearing a backlog costs three to four days with over 600 reviews on top of new material. Set the daily limit for new cards so that you can still manage it in a week with three tests. The home screen widgets show you what is due today before it piles up.

4. Slides next to the editor. In a discussion on r/Medizinstudium, people say that ready-made decks sometimes do not match your own lectures or are out of date. For exactly these gaps, open the lecture PDF in checkst's split view: the slide on the left, the card editor on the right. On iPad this is especially pleasant. If your device supports Apple's on-device models, checkst suggests cards for the slide, or you can use your own OpenAI key. You decide which ones stay.

5. Do not copy every slide. A post on r/medicalschoolanki is titled "I spent 12 hours making Anki cards this week. I only studied for 4." The replies advise adding to existing cards in a targeted way instead of transferring every slide. Rule of thumb: first search the finished deck, then add only what your lecturer actually examines.

6. Study group instead of going it alone. Like the Freiburg AG Anki, you can set up a study group in checkst, invite people by link or QR code and share decks for the local exam. The leaderboard shows who is keeping up.

Example cards

Good clinical cards ask about a number, a threshold or a decision, not a whole chapter. Four examples, each with a guideline or product information as the source:

One card, one piece of information. If your answer needs more than one line, make two cards out of it.

What the research says

In 2009, Larsen, Butler and Roediger had physicians in training either repeatedly tested or repeatedly read. After more than six months, the testing group scored 39 percent on the final test, the reading group 26 percent. A meta-analysis by Maye and Hurley from 2026 summarises 13 studies with a total of 21,415 learners and finds a clear advantage for spaced repetition in medical education. The formats studied, however, range from flashcards to e-mail quizzes.

For Anki itself, there are mainly surveys: in Wothe, Wanberg and colleagues, daily Anki use was associated with better Step 1 results, but not with better Step 2 results. This is a correlation from a survey with 165 responses, not proof. For a particular German deck or a particular FSRS setting, there is no established grade advantage.

Limitations

• No deck updates via add-on. No AnkiHub, no AnkiCollab, no AMBOSS button. You get a new deck version as a new .apkg file.
• Image occlusion: good for learning, mass production is better on a computer. checkst displays image occlusion cards from Anki decks as Anki does, one card per masked area. If you mask entire atlas series yourself, Anki on a computer with a mouse is faster, and you then import the result as an .apkg.
• No question practice. checkst is not a question bank. For the M2 you need AMBOSS, via medici or past questions.
• iPhone and iPad only. No Android app, no web version. Anki desktop remains useful for building large decks, and you move between the two via .apkg.