Anki app for pharmacy studies: active ingredients on the iPhone

Pharmacy is the course in which, after four semesters of basic study, you sit 360 multiple-choice questions over four days and only then really start with pharmacology. The University of Würzburg reports, looking back from a graduating cohort, more than 580 structural formulas that had to be memorized. Anyone who tries this without a system learns each formula three times.

This page shows you how to learn pharmacy with flashcards and checkst, where the research supports you, and where it surprisingly finds little.

The exams in brief

Basic study in semesters 1 to 4, then the 1st state exam. Main study in semesters 5 to 8, then the oral 2nd state exam. After that the practical year and the 3rd state exam.

In autumn 2026, the failure rates of the individual subject groups according to the IMPP were between 20.7 and 22.4 percent. This is not the share that ultimately fails, but it shows: each group is a separate hurdle.

The 2nd state exam is oral and broader. According to the Approbation Regulations, pharmacology covers, among other things, mechanisms of action, pharmacokinetics, side effects, interactions, contraindications and dosage. In pharmaceutical biology: medicinal plants, drugs and phytopharmaceuticals with their constituents, effects and identification.

How pharmacy students study

Working through old questions is standard. The Kiel student council recommends old original MC questions for exam preparation, and the Düsseldorf student council offers memory protocols, lecture notes and active substance profiles. Important: according to StudiClub, the IMPP has not issued new licenses for original questions since spring 2025. New practice questions are therefore not automatically original questions.

For Anki decks, the picture is thinner than in medicine. Pharmazing offers pharmacology cards as an Anki edition, according to the provider 2,350 cards on 624 drug substances. We found no nationwide standard deck or an established drug knowledge deck. This means you build a lot yourself.

Your workflow with checkst

1. Slides in split view. Open the PDF of the lecture in checkst: slide on the left, card editor on the right. For structural formulas, you cut a section directly out of the slide and place it as an image on the card. If the section has labels you want to quiz, you black them out beforehand. This turns a slide into a formula card without screenshot fiddling.

2. Text without typing it out. For active substance profiles and lecture notes, text recognition reads the text from photos. Or you have card suggestions generated from the slide, on the device or with your own OpenAI key. For dosages and contraindications, you check every card against the source; AI suggestions are not specialist information.

3. Facts with context. An experience report on r/pharmacy describes exactly this problem: despite Anki, only isolated facts were learned, no connections. So do not only make "drug → side effect", but also "Why does this drug cause this side effect?".

4. Import decks. You open purchased or shared Anki decks as .apkg in checkst. Image occlusion cards and formulas in MathJax notation are displayed as they are in Anki.

5. FSRS and target retention. checkst schedules with FSRS. According to the Anki manual, 90 percent target retention is the standard; above 97 percent the effort rises drastically. If you did not know the answer: "Again", not "Hard".

6. Semester study group. Share your drug decks in a checkst study group, invitation via link or QR code. For pharmacology with hundreds of drugs, dividing up the work is more than nice.

Example cards

The last card is the most valuable: it asks about the mechanism behind an interaction. Anyone who understands the principle has to rote-memorize fewer individual combinations.

What the research says

Ironically, for pharmacy there are mixed findings, and you should know them. Terenyi and colleagues had students assign trade and active substance names in 2018. Those who practiced in a distributed way retained more in the long term: 67 percent with shortening intervals versus 50 percent with massed practice. In a follow-up study in 2019, increasing intervals performed best. The 2018 study also shows how quickly things fade without repetition: average performance fell from 95 percent in the final exam to 55 percent six weeks later.

But: a voluntary online learning game with distributed questions by Sando and Feng was popular, yet did not measurably improve exam performance. And in Alexander et al. 2024, additional retrieval practice after six months made no difference, tested with only five questions. Spaced repetition is therefore not magic. It helps with what you actually retrieve.

Limitations

• Image occlusion: ready-made cards yes, mass production better on the computer. checkst shows image occlusion cards from Anki decks just like Anki, one card per hidden area. Anyone who masks hundreds of structural formulas themselves is faster with Anki on the computer.
• No question bank. You have to do the multiple-choice practice with old questions or exam trainers.
• No ready-made pharmacy deck. checkst does not come with its own content.
• Apple only. iPhone and iPad, no Android, no web app.