Why spaced repetition suits this exam
SQE1 is closed book, and a session gives you about 108 seconds a question. Anything you have to reconstruct from first principles is effectively unavailable. What you need is recall that arrives whole — and recall that arrives whole is built by being asked, failing, and being asked again at increasing intervals.
The other reason is the calendar. A working candidate spends six to nine months preparing, which means month one’s material has to survive until month eight. Spaced repetition is the cheapest mechanism for that: a few minutes a day instead of re-reading a subject from scratch.
What belongs on a card
The test is whether the answer is a fact rather than a judgment. Good candidates for cards:
- Thresholds and majorities — which resolution, what percentage, what notice.
- Time limits — limitation periods, the detention clock, deadlines for acknowledging a claim, the period for filing a tax return after completion.
- Lists with a fixed membership — the three certainties, the grounds for refusing bail, the elements of theft, the classes of land charge.
- Rules with a bright line — client money against business money, the formalities for a valid will, when a transfer of costs may be made.
- Distinctions you keep conflating — summary judgment against strike out, condition against warranty, following against tracing.
Write the card as a question with one answer. “What majority is required for a special resolution?” is a card. “Company resolutions” is a heading.
What does not
- Anything requiring application. Whether an interference is unreasonable, whether a term is a condition — those are questions for the question bank.
- Whole cases. Facts and outcomes of cases in detail; the exam wants the rule they stand for.
- Cards with three answers. If you cannot answer it in one breath, split it.
- Material you have never met in a question. Making cards from a textbook before practising is how people spend a month building a deck and learning nothing.
The schedule
The mechanics matter less than the fact that intervals expand. A card answered correctly comes back later each time; a card answered wrongly comes back soon. Any system implementing that works — ours reviews flashcards and mistakes on the same schedule, and the arithmetic is the same in any app.
Two rules of thumb:
- Do the reviews daily, and cap them. Fifteen minutes. A backlog of 400 due cards is how decks get abandoned.
- Delete ruthlessly. A card you have answered correctly five times in a row is finished. Keeping it costs time you could spend on questions.
Cards from your own mistakes
The highest-value deck you will ever have is the one built from questions you got wrong. The workflow: answer a set, review every wrong answer and every guess, and where the cause was “I did not know the rule”, write one card. Where the cause was misreading the question, write nothing — that is technique, and it is fixed by reading the question differently, not by a card.
Done consistently, this produces a deck of a few hundred cards that maps precisely onto your own gaps, and it shrinks as they close.
The limits
Flashcards build recall of rules. They do not build the skill of choosing between five plausible options under time, which is what the exam actually measures — a candidate with a perfect deck and no question practice will still lose marks to distractors that are true but not asked.
The proportions that work: questions as the main revision, flashcards as the maintenance layer underneath, and mocks to check both. How to use practice questions covers the first, and the revision plan puts them in order.