Flashcard app for the Abitur: learning without cramming

Sound familiar? Three days before the exam you cram everything in, write the exam, and a week later it's all gone. In the upper secondary years that's annoying. For the Abi it's expensive, because then you need the Q1 material again, which you so efficiently forgot back then. The education advisory service in Bern calls this binge-learning and considers it less sustainable than long-term knowledge building. Politely put.

This page shows you how to do it differently with flashcards, what the research says about it, and how checkst takes the planning work off your hands.

The Abitur in three sentences

According to the KMK, you have four or five examination subjects, at least three of them written and at least one oral, at least two at advanced level. The exact number of written exams depends on the state: in Lower Saxony it is four, in Hesse, Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia three until 2026. Almost all states have a central Abitur with tasks drawn from a shared pool; Rhineland-Palatinate works decentrally with central elements.

And because the Abitur grade also draws on the qualification phase, it is not only the exam day that counts. For context: according to the KMK, the average grade in 2025 ranged from 2.13 in Thuringia to 2.46 in Schleswig-Holstein.

Why cramming feels good and is still bad

In 2006, Roediger and Karpicke had students either re-read texts or recall them from memory. After five minutes, re-reading was better. After two days and after one week, retrieval won. The catch: repeated reading made people more confident. Cramming doesn't just feel good, it also deceives you.

Cepeda and colleagues studied how large the gaps should be in 2008 with over 1,350 people: if the test is one week away, the best gap was about 20 to 40 percent of that time. For a one-year horizon, 5 to 10 percent. Translated: for the Abi, which is months away, it pays to start early and let the gaps grow. That is exactly what a flashcard app does automatically.

And this doesn't only hold in the lab. In 2021, Agarwal, Nunes and Blunt compiled studies in school and classroom contexts with a total of 5,374 learners: 57 percent of the effects showed medium or large benefits for retrieval practice.

What belongs on cards

• Biology: technical terms, functions, short explanatory questions about processes.
• History: terms, sequences of events, actors, causes and consequences.
• Chemistry and maths: formulas with the meaning of the variables, units, and when the formula applies.
• Foreign languages: actively recall vocabulary, gap sentences. More on this at learning vocabulary.

What does not belong on cards: material analysis, source interpretation, solving calculation problems. Practise those with past Abitur papers.

Your plan with checkst

Six months before: get an overview, find gaps. This is how the PHWT recommends structuring Abitur preparation. In checkst, create one deck per subject and start with the material you have not seen for the longest time.

Create cards quickly. Photograph your notes or worksheet and checkst reads the text via text recognition. Open a PDF from your teacher in split view: the sheet on the left, the card editor on the right. Or let the AI suggest cards, directly on the iPhone if it supports Apple's on-device models, otherwise optionally with your own OpenAI key. Read through the suggestions. Whatever is wrong gets removed.

Three months before: use flashcards and past Abitur papers intensively, again according to the PHWT. checkst plans with FSRS, with the target retention set to 90 percent by default. If you didn't know something: press "Again", not "Hard", otherwise the algorithm believes you can do it.

The final days: checkst has a cram mode that first quizzes you on the cards you are most likely to forget. It is no substitute for the preceding months, but it is the right way to use the last few days.

Not alone. Set up a study group with your Biology advanced course, invite each other via QR code and share a deck. The leaderboard and your streak make sure you study even on days when you don't feel like it. The home screen widget shows you what is due today.

Example cards

Each card asks exactly one thing. For history, a second card on the why pays off: what role did Article 48 play at the end of the Republic? You explain that to yourself before turning the card over.

And Quizlet?

Many pupils know Quizlet. In 2022 Quizlet limited its study modes for users without Plus; the German help pages currently mention a limited free offering in study mode and one free practice test per study set (as of November 2026). The bigger difference, however, is planning: checkst calculates for each card when you should see it again, instead of having you click through an entire set over and over.

Limitations

• No ready-made Abitur decks from us. checkst does not come with ready-made Abitur cards. You create them yourself, with your course, or import Anki decks.
• No Quizlet import. You cannot take over sets from Quizlet directly.
• No Abitur papers. For the exam formats you need the tasks from your state.
• Apple only. iPhone and iPad, no Android, no web version. If half your course has Android, you can only share decks via Anki files.