The Best Anki Workflow for the DAT

DATBooster provides free Anki decks for you to complete throughout your DAT journey; however, seeing 2,000+ new cards on day 1 can be intimidating. How can we utilize this great resource without getting lost and overwhelmed? This article will address that very problem by providing you with a workflow to use with Booster’s complementary Anki decks from Day 1.

Normally, if you were to download the decks and begin doing cards while you reviewed content, you may run into the problem of doing flashcards on material completely different than the material you are reviewing. For example, you may be watching/reading lectures about photosynthesis while doing cards on taxonomy. Obviously, this is not ideal. We want to be completing the flashcards relevant to the material actively being reviewed. Fortunately, DATBooster’s Anki cards are designed, through the use of tags, in a way that allows you to easily activate the cards relevant to whatever material you study on any given day. Here, I will walk you through how to take advantage of these tags to optimize your studying.

I. Prerequisites

1. Download all flashcards from the DATBooster site (Biology, General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Quantitative Reasoning)
2. Add the Hierarchal Tags to your Anki Application (See my “Top 5 Add-on” article on how to do this)

II. How the Cards Are Tagged

First, let’s take a look at how these cards are organized. All cards are organized based on topic. Biology cards are tagged based on Feralis’s notes (available on the Biology page). For example, if you are studying Cell Organelles in the Cell & Molecular Biology notes, you would “Browse” your cards and find the cards tagged under Biology > Cell&Molecular_Biology > Cells > Organelles.

General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry and Quantitative Reasoning sections do not follow 1-for-1 the material on DATBooster in the same way as Biology but these subjects are still organized by topic and can be discovered the same way. All you have to do is find the topic that you are studying that day in the Tags.

Now that we know how to find cards on specific topics, let’s go through the workflow. 

III. Suspend All Cards

The first step for this workflow is to suspend all the cards. You can do this by going into “Browse”, clicking “Whole Collection” on the top left, highlighting all the cards (ctrl/cmd+A), right-clicking and choosing “Toggle Suspend.”

When you do this, all cards should be yellow and when you go on the main page, it should appear as if your decks are empty.

Now, we are in a situation where we can selectively unsuspend the cards relevant to our studies!

IV. Unsuspend Cards in Coordination With Review

Now that all our cards are suspended, we can now un-suspend specific cards that correspond to whatever lecture we are doing. Let’s take the example above where we just read Feralis’s notes on cell organelles. Like above, go to Biology>Cell&Molecular_Biology>Cells>Organelles and click on that tag label. Highlight all the cards, right-click and again toggle suspend.

Now only those specific cards should show up on your main dashboard as New Cards!

Congratulations! You can now do active recall and begin the spaced repetition timeline with the exact cards relevant to whatever you are studying! Continue this process after you complete a video lecture/notes chapter and be sure to do your cards every day!