Anki alternative: exam questions you can trace to the page
Anki is the default in medicine and the health sciences, and most people looking for an alternative are not unhappy with the scheduler. They are stuck one step earlier, with a deck that nobody has written yet. MedUni Exam writes exam-style questions from a document you upload and verifies each one against it. Most students who use both use them at different stages of study.
Free to try. No card and no account needed.
Try the sample exam, ten real questions with no upload and no account.
What Anki does well
- Long term retention of discrete facts, with a scheduler that has been refined for two decades
- Free, open source, and the decks are yours as files, on your device
- Large shared decks for standardized exams, most famously step-style medical decks
- Complete control over card wording, cloze deletions, images and audio
- Mature mobile and desktop clients with offline study
What that costs you
Cards have to exist. Writing good cards from a chapter takes longer than reading the chapter, and a downloaded deck is written against someone else’s syllabus. A card also tests recall of a fact, which is not the same skill as picking the best answer from five plausible options in a vignette.
What MedUni Exam does
- Generates the questions for you from your own PDF, with the page reference attached
- Writes exam formats: single best answer, clinical vignettes, multi-select, true or false, short answer
- Verifies each question twice before you see it, against the quote and with a second model
- Grades a whole exam, scores it A to F, and shows mastery per chapter
- Queues what you missed for review and weights later exams toward your weak topics
Side by side
| Anki | MedUni Exam | |
|---|---|---|
| Where content comes from | You write it or download a shared deck | Generated from the file you upload, or from text you paste or import |
| Format | Flashcards and cloze deletions | Exam questions, including vignettes and short answer |
| Source checking | Whatever you put on the card | Verbatim quote verified on the cited page, plus a second model check |
| Scheduling | Full spaced repetition algorithm | Review queue for missed questions, weighted exams |
| Offline | Yes | A connection is needed to generate and to take an exam |
| Cost | Free on desktop and Android; paid iOS app | Free: 300 verified questions a month with an account, 60 as a guest. Exam Pass $19.99 for 90 days; Pro $9.99 a month |
Using both
A workable split: generate questions from a chapter here, take them, and move the handful of facts you keep missing into Anki as cards for long term retention. Practice exams tell you what you do not know. Spaced cards keep what you learned from leaking away before finals.
Generate questions from your chapter
No account needed to try it. Registering keeps your library, grades and review queue across devices.
Also compared with ChatGPT and with PDFToQuiz, specification row by specification row.
Published , updated .