Every day
While an exam is being prepared for, it’s the first thing on Today, and the day’s session studies it before your topics. So if you study each day with Study, you’re following the plan without doing anything else.
You can also study it on its own: open the exam and choose Study, or press S. The button says about how long today takes, such as “Study · ~25 min”.
An exam’s session works like any other (see During a session), with its topics mixed together. Its rating buttons say when the exam brings the card back: “Tomorrow”, a weekday, a date, “Final pass” if only the final pass does, or “Safe” if the card is known well enough to not come back before the exam.
Everything you answer for an exam counts for spaced repetition too, so nothing has to be studied twice. While an exam is being prepared for, its cards are studied in the exam, not in their topics. A card in two exams is studied in the sooner one.
The exam’s page
The top of the page shows the days left, the day, and what the exam studies today, such as “12 due · 8 new”. Below is the readiness bar: how much of the exam you’d remember if you stopped studying now, with a mark where following the plan gets you. It’s red below 50%, yellow below 80% and green from there.
Below that is the plan as a strip of days. The days gone by show whether you studied, and each day left is a bar as high as its work. Today is outlined, and the final pass and any days of cramming have their own colors. Point at a day or tap it to see its numbers.
Then come the exam’s topics, each with its cards and readiness. The Cards tab lists every card of the exam by topic, the least known first, each with its chance to be remembered on the day.
When new cards were added to its topics since you added the exam, the page says how many and about how much they add to a day.
If you miss a day
The plan catches up on its own. The reviews from the missed day are studied today if that keeps the day about its usual size. Otherwise they’re spread over the next 3 study days, and the page says so.
The last days
- The final pass: in the last 2 or 3 study days before the exam, every card that isn’t known well enough yet comes back once more, the weakest closest to the exam.
- Cramming: only when time is short, with fewer than three study days left and work still to do. A cramming day has two rounds: study the first whenever you like, and the second is due three hours after you finish it, if that’s before 10 in the evening. The end of a round says when the next one is. A plan followed from its start never needs to cram.
- The day of the exam has no plan of its own. On the day, Practice the least known practices the 20 cards you’re least likely to remember, without changing when any is due.
For how the plan decides all this, see How exam plans work.