Lucida for medical school

What the research says about flashcards in medical school

The evidence is encouraging and not conclusive. A 2015 survey of 72 students at one school found that each extra 445 board-style practice questions, or 1,700 unique Anki flashcards, went with about one more point on USMLE Step 1, after accounting for other academic and psychological factors. The link held for Anki, which the paper calls user-generated, and not for the one commercial flashcard product it also asked about. The authors called the study exploratory, and the data were self-reported.

A 2026 systematic review of 11 studies reported that three of them showed a consistent link between regular Anki use and higher Step 1 scores, with high-frequency users scoring 4 to 13 points above minimal users. Results for course exams were mixed, and the one study of Step 2 CK found no benefit. The evidence is largely observational, so it shows a link, not a cause.

The practical reading is to use both: practice questions and flashcards each went with better scores. Lucida doesn’t change that. It’s a way to make and schedule the flashcard part.

Make cards from your lectures

In Lucida, choose Make cards and add your slides, a PDF, a recording of the lecture, pictures of your notes or pasted text. You pick the deck, how many cards and whether you want basic or fill-in-the-blank cards, and Lucida shows the new cards first, so you can keep, edit or remove each one.

You can also connect your AI app once (see AI flashcards), then share a lecture or your notes and ask for cards. For medical school, ask your AI for one fact per card, fill-in-the-blank cards for facts inside sentences (a mechanism, a drug’s target), and a one-line why in each note. Try: “Make flashcards from this lecture for my Pharmacology deck. One fact per card. Use fill-in-the-blank for mechanisms and side effects, and add a one-line why. Tag each card with its drug family.”

Read every card before you study it. Lucida shows the cards it makes before they are saved, and with your own AI you can turn on Let me check AI cards first. Lucida’s terms say not to rely on Lucida for medical advice. In one 2026 test of cards written from a reader’s highlights (a different job from studying for a course), even the best model made cards its authors rated unusable 36% of the time. For medical facts, check the cards against your course material.

Image occlusion for anatomy, histology and pathways

Add a slide or diagram, draw boxes over the labels, and type what’s under each box. Every box is its own card with its own schedule, so you can know one structure and keep forgetting another. Choose Hide one to keep the rest of the picture as context, or Hide all to recall without hints. In Learn mode, each box becomes a multiple choice question with the picture’s other labels as the choices. A picture holds up to 30 boxes.

Piotr Wozniak’s twenty rules of formulating knowledge say obstructing parts of a picture is great for learning anatomy (rule 8). On Free, up to 100 cards can have a picture or a sound, and a picture with many boxes counts once. Only use pictures you have the right to use. See image occlusion.

Plan the schedule around your exams

• New cards a day starts at 20. Raise it slowly: each new card adds reviews later, and Anki’s manual warns that adding new cards while you’re behind can make a backlog worse.
• Tag your cards by system or topic (cardio, renal, biostatistics). Tags give you Learn mode sets, and on Pro the Stats page ranks tags by how much you remember (a tag needs about 8 reviews first) and lists your hardest cards and the cards you keep forgetting.
• Put an exam date on each deck (Pro). From 30 days out, cards you’d probably forget by exam day come up early, and Stats shows how much of the deck you’d likely remember on the day.
• Let your AI quiz you on weak spots (Pro). It can read your weak tags and hardest cards and write new questions for them.
• On Free, your Library shows what’s due and how long it takes, which is enough to pick a pace. The Stats page is part of Pro.

Bring the cards you already have

You can import cards from Anki’s Notes in Plain Text export, from Quizlet’s export, or from a CSV file. Review history, pictures, sounds and tags don’t come along, and Lucida can’t open .apkg files (see importing). Decks like the AnKing Step Deck are built for Anki and delivered through AnkiHub, which works with Anki, so Lucida can’t use them directly.

What Lucida doesn’t have

• No .apkg import and no Anki add-ons, so no direct use of big Anki decks that depend on them.
• No built-in medical content and no question bank. It’s a flashcard tool, and you bring or make the content.
• Text imports drop pictures, sounds, tags and review history.
• Math and chemistry formulas are basic: powers, subscripts, fractions, roots and Greek letters, but not full equation layout. Use a picture card for structures.
• Image occlusion boxes are rectangles only.
• It needs an internet connection, and the native iPhone app isn’t on the App Store yet.

Keep reading

Lucida for the MCAT

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Image occlusion flashcards

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AI flashcards that land in your decks

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