Flashcard app for business studies: working through the slide mountain

Business studies has the reputation of being the relaxed degree. Anyone sitting in the first exam period sees it differently. In a Reddit discussion, someone mentions roughly 400 to 500 slides in a single foundation module in the first semester. The problem is rarely that the material is difficult. The problem is that there is so much of it, and that you cram it in over three weeks before the exam, only to forget it afterwards.

The GEW calls this bulimia learning: take it in briefly, reproduce it in the exam, forget it. This page shows you how to do it differently with flashcards and where flashcards don't help in business studies.

What to expect

The foundations are similar everywhere: bookkeeping, cost accounting, marketing, mathematics and statistics, microeconomics, law. When each comes up varies. At HAW Kiel, bookkeeping, marketing, business law and maths are in the first semester, cost accounting, micro and statistics in the second.

Exam formats are similar too. The 2023 Mannheim first-semester introduction mentions, for example, a 90-minute accounting exam and multiple-choice exams in economics and analysis. And in a Mannheim first-semester evaluation, students complain there are too few past exams. If you have little practice material, you have to make the content testable yourself.

What belongs on cards and what doesn't

• Good: definitions and distinctions between similar terms, formulas with the meaning of their variables, key figures with calculation and interpretation, journal entries for typical business transactions.
• Not good: complete calculation tasks. You learn cost accounting by calculating.

For calculation tasks, research still offers a tip. In 2007, Rohrer and Taylor had students practise maths problems. Spread over several sessions, it was better a week later than all in one block. And practising mixed problem types was better than blocked practice. In practice: don't work through ten contribution margin tasks in a row; mix contribution margin, break-even and key figures.

Your workflow with checkst

1. Slides in. Open the lecture slides as a PDF in checkst's split view: the slide on the left, the card editor on the right. With 400 slides, you don't write every card by hand. Have the AI suggest cards for a slide section, either on the device via Apple's Foundation Models or with your own OpenAI key. Read through the suggestions and delete anything that just repeats slide text.

2. Cut into small pieces. Another discussion describes exactly this problem: first break slide mountains into learnable units. One card, one piece of information. "What is the contribution margin?" is a card. "Explain partial cost accounting" is not.

3. Turn mistakes into cards. One Reddit user describes preparing for an economics entrance exam like this: calculate old exams, analyse errors, turn each error into an Anki card. That is one individual experience, but a good habit. Worked a past exam and got a journal entry wrong? Card.

4. Start early and let FSRS do the scheduling. checkst uses FSRS. According to the Anki manual, the target retention is 90 percent by default; above 97 percent, the workload rises sharply. If you review a few minutes a day from the third lecture week onward, the exam period becomes repetition rather than first contact. And if you didn't know the answer: "Again", not "Hard".

5. Together with your cohort. Create a study group for the module in checkst, share the deck, invite people via link or QR code. Dividing up 400 slides isn't cheating, it's efficiency. After all, you're business students.

Example cards

The break-even card is the formula. Whether you can apply it you only find out from a task with real numbers.

What the research says

Yang and colleagues analysed 222 studies with 48,478 learners: quizzes in class produced a clear average advantage. Lyle and Crawford found in a statistics lecture that short retrieval exercises at the end of lectures went along with better exam results.

To be honest: a 2024 study across several introductory STEM courses found, in the full dataset, no significant advantage of spaced over massed retrieval practice in any of the eight courses analysed individually. The findings are therefore not as uniform as learning influencers would like. There is no quantifiable grade advantage from Anki in business studies.

Limitations

• You have to do the calculations yourself. Cards don't replace practice tasks or past exams.
• AI suggestions are suggestions. Check formulas and journal entries against your lecture handout before you learn them.
• No ready-made business decks. checkst doesn't come with content. You import Anki decks from fellow students as .apkg.
• Apple only. iPhone and iPad, no Android, no web app.