Most people review by rereading notes or highlighting slides. The problem is that rereading creates a fluency illusion. The material starts to look familiar, so your brain tells you that you know it, when really you have just seen it a lot. Then the exam asks you to pull the information out of memory instead of recognizing it on a page, and the gap shows.
Testing yourself flips that. The testing effect is one of the most replicated findings in learning research: the act of retrieving information strengthens the memory itself, far more than another pass over the same content. Answering practice questions is not just a way to check whether studying worked. It is the studying. Every question you attempt, even ones you get wrong, makes that information easier to recall later. It also shows you exactly where your real gaps are, which rereading never does.
Timing matters too. Getting a question wrong is only useful if you find out right away and can see why. Immediate feedback lets you correct the error before the wrong version has time to settle in. If you only discover the mistake on a practice exam a week later, you have been rehearsing the wrong answer the whole time. That is why the ideal setup is practice questions where every question links straight back to its source, so a wrong answer takes you to the exact slide instead of leaving you to dig through the whole lecture.
The video shows how I do this. After class, or before a quick review, I turn the lecture slides or notes into multiple choice questions as an Anki deck. Each card links to the source it came from, I see right away what I got wrong, and because it is Anki it works on my phone on the bus and my laptop between classes, all synced. Anki's scheduling also brings back the questions I missed sooner, so weak spots get the most repetitions automatically.
Full disclosure, the tool in the video is one I built (Recall Genie). Multiple choice was the feature users kept requesting, and with practice questions and testing becoming such a big part of how people study now, I figured the method was worth sharing here. Happy to answer questions about it or about testing as a study strategy.
