Anki for the Physikum: learning Ankiphil on the iPhone

Honestly, the Physikum is a memory test with advance warning: 320 multiple-choice questions with five answer options each, spread across two days of four hours each. Added to that is the oral-practical part in anatomy, biochemistry and physiology. And precisely because you know what is coming, a system that reminds you regularly over two years is worth it.

The good news first: in autumn 2026, according to the IMPP, around 90 percent of all candidates passed the written part, and around 96 percent in the reference group of first-time candidates with minimum study duration. In spring 2026 the overall figure was only around 80.6 percent.

How the Physikum is structured

The IMPP specifies the content in the GK1 subject catalogue. Important for your question bank: the IMPP ended the commercial licensing of its examination questions at the end of 2024. Newer questions in learning platforms are therefore not automatically original questions.

The oral examination lasts 45 to 60 minutes per candidate, with at most four candidates. It includes practical tasks and interdisciplinary questions, and the examiners ask about basic understanding and clinical connections. There is no nationwide list of specimens.

Study phase: what the plans provide

AMBOSS offers for the M1 an intensive plan over 50 days (44 study days plus 6 days of dress rehearsal), a turbo plan with 30 study days plus dress rehearsal, and a subject-focus plan by subject. Thieme via medici has a 40-day and a 60-day plan. At AMBOSS the routine is always the same: read the daily chapter, then work through the matching question session.

Anki fits into this rhythm as a third pillar. Not as a replacement for working through questions, but so that biochemistry from the second semester does not start from zero during the study phase.

Ankiphil and other preclinical decks

• AMBOSS feat. Ankiphil: explicitly recommended by AMBOSS for the preclinical phase and the Physikum, with cards on the preclinical chapters and AMBOSS images. On the Ankizin project page it runs as Ankiphil v5 with AnkiWeb download.
• HistoHal: histology deck from the same project. While researching, the linked download returned an error, so please check this yourself.
• Ankizin Anatomy IO: anatomy with image occlusion, listed on the project's link list.
• Local decks: many student associations and senior semesters pass on their own decks, often with atlas images for the course assessments.

Your workflow with checkst

1. Import Ankiphil over the semester. Open the .apkg, done. Then don't do everything at once: unlock only the chapters currently covered in lectures. A Reddit experience report explicitly warns against starting the whole deck only shortly before the exam.

2. Set the daily limit honestly. In Physikum reports, students describe how new cards and reviews eventually become impossible to keep up with together. In checkst you set per deck how many new cards are added per day. When the due cards keep growing, the right answer is: fewer new cards, not more coffee.

3. FSRS and target retention. checkst schedules with FSRS. The Anki manual's default is 90 percent target retention; the manual advises against going above 97 percent. And if you did not know the answer, press "Again", not "Hard".

4. Course slides in split view. To close gaps between the deck and the lecture, open the PDF in checkst: slide on the left, editor on the right. For atlas images on the slides, cut out a section and black out the detected labels before the image goes onto the card. For lecture notes, text recognition reads the text from photos, so you don't have to type it out.

5. Shortly before the date. For the final days, checkst has a cram mode that first quizzes you on the cards you are most likely to have forgotten. For this you choose a target retention.

6. With your study group. For the course assessments, you share decks in a checkst study group, invitation by link or QR code. The streak keeps you going on days when you don't really feel like it.

Example cards

Physikum cards that work are short and ask about exactly one thing. One each from anatomy, biochemistry and physiology:

For the oral examination that is not enough: there you have to explain why. So occasionally add a why card to each fact card, for example: "What happens to glycolysis when fructose-2,6-bisphosphate rises?"

What the research says

In 2017, Dobson, Perez and Linderholm compared five learning conditions for skeletal muscle anatomy with the same total study time. After one week, the combination of distributed learning and active retrieval performed best. In Mehta et al. (2023), the higher-performing group of first-year students started using Anki earlier and did more repetitions overall. However, this was a small analysis of 25 usage files, and the authors explicitly rule out a causal interpretation. There is no evidence that a particular deck raises the pass rate.

Limitations

• Building image occlusion yourself is more convenient on a computer. checkst displays ready-made IO cards as Anki does, one card per occluded area (natively in Anki since version 23.10). For large anatomy image series that you mask yourself, Anki on a computer remains the faster tool.
• No question bank. You will have to work through questions elsewhere.
• No deck updates via add-on. You get new Ankiphil versions as a new file.
• Apple only. iPhone and iPad; no Android, no browser.