Lecture slides look like study material, but they are a speaker's notes. A slide with four short bullets made sense in the room. A week later, it often doesn't. So the job is not to copy slides onto cards. The job is to turn each slide into questions you can answer without looking.
This guide shows how to do that with a tool, and how to do it by hand. Both work. The hand method is slower, but you learn while you write.
Why slides make weak cards on their own
Slides leave things out on purpose. The lecturer fills the gaps with talk, examples, and drawings on the board. If you make a card from a bullet like Causes of inflation, the back of the card has nothing to say. You end up with cards that test the slide title, not the idea.
- Bullets are fragments. A card needs a full question and a full answer.
- Diagrams hold key facts, but only as pictures. Labels on a chart are easy to skip.
- Some slides are only a title or a photo. They carry nothing to test.
- The most important point is often the one the lecturer repeated, not the one in bold.
So before you make cards, spend ten minutes with your lecture notes or the recording. Next to each thin slide, add the one or two things that were said. That small step makes every card after it better.
Step 1: Quiz yourself before you make cards
Most students make a card for every slide. That gives you a big deck full of things you already know. A better order is to test first, then make cards only for what you got wrong.
There is research behind testing first. Richland, Kornell and Kao (2009) found that trying to answer questions before studying helped people learn the material, even when their first answers were wrong. It also saves time. You skip cards for the easy slides.
If your slides are a PowerPoint file, you can upload the .pptx to the slides to quiz tool. It reads the text on the slides and writes multiple choice, true or false, and fill in the blank questions. Every answer says why. Take the test, and keep the list of questions you missed.
Step 2: Turn the misses into cards
Each missed question points to an idea you don't know yet. Make one card for that idea. In Quizfix, the Fix round does this for you: it turns the misses into cards and drills them right away. You can also do it on paper or in any card app.
If your lecturer shares slides as a PDF, use the PDF to flashcards tool instead. It works with scanned PDFs too, because it reads the page pictures. Without an account, it reads the first 30 pages of a file, so split a very long deck into parts.
How to write good cards by hand
Writing cards yourself takes longer, but the writing is study too. You have to decide what matters and say it in your own words. These rules keep hand-made cards useful.
- One idea per card. If the answer has three parts, make three cards, or ask for the parts as a list you must recall in full.
- Ask a real question. Write What does an enzyme do to activation energy? and not Enzymes.
- Keep the answer short. One sentence or a few words. If you need a paragraph, the card is too big.
- Use your own words. Copying the slide line by line makes a card you can recognize but not explain.
- Add the why. A card like Why does X happen? tests more than What is X?
- Turn diagrams into questions. Cover a label and ask what goes there, or ask what happens at one step of a process.
- Make a reverse card for terms you must use both ways. Term to meaning, and meaning to term.
A good test for any card: could a classmate who missed the lecture answer it from the back of the card alone? If not, add the missing context.
Step 3: Drill the cards over days, not in one night
Cards work best when you see them more than once, with gaps between the reviews. Cepeda et al. (2006) reviewed many studies on this spacing effect and found that spread out practice beats the same practice done all at once. Our guide on spaced repetition before an exam shows how to set up the gaps.
Say the answer before you flip the card. Out loud or in your head is fine, but commit to it. Flipping first and thinking yes, I knew that is rereading, not recall. The guide on active recall vs rereading explains why that matters.
- Review new cards the same day you make them, then again the next day.
- Cards you get right can wait a few days. Cards you miss come back soon.
- After a week of cards, take a new test on the slides to check what stuck.
What slides can't give you
Be honest about the limits. A tool can only use what is in the file. If the key idea was on the whiteboard, or only in the lecturer's voice, it is not in the slides, so it won't be in the quiz or the cards. Images with no text are hard to turn into questions too.
For those parts, add your own cards. Or upload your lecture notes, or a photo of the board, as a second source. If the lecture was recorded and posted online with speech, that can be a source as well. After any test, our guide on what to do after a practice test helps you decide what to study next.