A PA school study workflow for 100-slide lectures

A PA student on r/PAstudent asked how anyone keeps up with decks during "lectures with 100 slides+ and potentially 'paying attention'?" The replies describe split-screen PowerPoint and Anki, screenshots, audio recordings, and placeholder cards holding nothing but a slide number. The poster's own line was "I can never get my decks done in time."

They never get done because card-building and listening want the same attention. Card during class and you attend the lecture twice, once typing and once replaying the recording to hear what you typed through.

Class is for emphasis, and emphasis is not in the file. Mark the slide where the lecturer says "classic presentation" or "this is the one that gets missed," and the disposition slides, because admit versus discharge versus refer is where the vignette ends. Write down the aside that is on no slide. Everything else is in the PowerPoint, and the PowerPoint is yours after class.

The same poster added: "After 300 cards I don't remember what I learned at the start." The chain goes slides to notes document, notes to Anki, Anki to a question bank, and back to the notes when a question is missed. Every arrow is the same fact typed again.

Retyping feels like studying. It is not retrieval, and it is where the evening goes. Cut the middle step, the notes document that exists only to become cards. The slide already has the chart and the card is the retrieval unit. When making cards takes longer than reviewing them, the shuffle is usually why.

A clinical medicine lecture has a repeating shape. For each condition: presentation, confirming test, focused workup, initial treatment, disposition. That tells you which format each piece belongs in.

A PA student on r/PAstudent had "built up quite the decks" and had not studied "any past material after test day." A reply: "I just didn't have enough time in the day for it." This is didactic review debt. Every card you made for Monday is a daily obligation on Tuesday, and the queue does not know the exam is over.

So after each exam, before the next block, sort each lecture's cards into two piles.

Upload the lecture's PowerPoint directly, .pptx or .ppt. Speaker notes are not included in the conversion. Uploads are capped at 100 pages, so export a 130-slide cardiology lecture to PDF and cut it with the built-in splitter where the lecturer changed conditions. Set the level selector to PA, which frames the Story and the Practice questions for PA scope: diagnosis, workup, initial treatment, disposition.

The Anki deck is a standard .apkg with the source slide on the back of every card, so the high-yield line you did not card is still there. The generator works objectives first and aims to cover substantive lecture content with focused questions. Practice questions are five-option vignettes with an explanation that names the answer, a note on every wrong option, and the source slide. The Story is for the lecture you sat through and did not follow.

Check the output against the slides before Monday. The generator can omit a detail or state something wrong, and a wrong first-line drug is worse than no card. Verify doses against the slide, never against a patient. The questions are study aids, not NCCPA or PAEA items. New accounts start with three credits and no card. Anki plus Practice from one lecture is two credits. PDFs go in the same way.

The first lecture pass gives you context. Later retrieval tells you what you can still produce. Import the checked deck into Anki so its scheduler can use your responses to plan reviews. The spaced-repetition guide explains the forgetting curve and the separate jobs of explanation, recall, and application.

Keep the feedback loop short. When a Practice question exposes a missed distinction, revisit the source and the corresponding explanation. Repair the card if needed. You now have one specific point to work on instead of a reason to recopy the entire lecture.