Anki Settings for Cramming

You are behind. Life happened, or you procrastinated, and now you have a mountain of material to learn in a fraction of the time you should have taken. If you use default Anki settings right now, you will fail because the algorithm is trying to help you remember this information in three years, not three days. You need a tactical override.

The danger of using default settings for cramming

Most students make the mistake of simply increasing the "New Cards per Day" to 500 and hitting "Study." This is a recipe for disaster. When you force a massive volume of new cards into the standard pipeline, you create a "review tsunami." By day three, you will have thousands of reviews due, and the intervals will be too wide to ensure the information stays in your short-term memory for the exam.

To avoid this, you must separate your "cramming" from your "long-term learning." This is where complete optimization of your settings becomes necessary. If you modify your main deck settings to be aggressive, you permanently alter the ease factor of those cards. Once you "ease" a card too much during a panic session, Anki thinks you know it perfectly, and it will push the next review out to a month from now, even if you actually forgot it the moment you walked out of the exam hall.

According to YouSMLE, the best way to handle this is through Custom Study Sessions. This allows you to isolate a group of cards for a specific time window without ruining the underlying scheduling data for the rest of your academic career.

The Cramming Configuration Matrix

Depending on how much time you have left, your settings must change. A student with two months has a different problem than a student with two days. Here are the exact numerical values you should plug into your deck options.

Scenario A: The "Safe" Cram (2 Months Out)

At this stage, you are not in a panic, but you are behind. You can still leverage the power of spaced repetition. You should focus on a steady build-up. If you are managing a heavy load, you might want to look into settings for a two month window to balance your workload.

Scenario B: The "Panic" Cram (1 Week Out)

You have seven days. You cannot afford 1-day learning steps. You need to see the cards multiple times per day. For those in high-pressure environments, like medical school, these technical optimization guides are often the only way to survive the volume.

When you are in this window, you should also consider using specific settings for a one week deadline to ensure you aren't spending too much time on "Easy" cards and instead focusing on the "Hard" ones.

Scenario C: The "Hail Mary" (48 Hours Out)

You have 48 hours. Spaced repetition is now your enemy because the "space" is too long. You need "massed practice" disguised as Anki. At this point, you stop using the main deck settings entirely and move to Filtered Decks. If you are truly desperate, you may need AI-generated flashcards to avoid spending your last few hours manually typing cards.

The technical guide to Filtered Decks for cramming

A Filtered Deck is a temporary holding pen. It pulls cards out of your main deck, lets you hammer them, and then puts them back. This is the only way to "cram" without permanently altering the ease factor of your cards.

To set this up, go to Tools > Create Filtered Deck. Now, the most important part is the search string. If you just want to see everything you haven't mastered yet, use this exact string:

If you want to focus only on the cards you keep getting wrong (the "leeches"), use:

Once the deck is created, look at the checkboxes. Uncheck "Reschedule cards based on my answers in this deck." This is the "secret sauce." By unchecking this, you can review the same card 10 times in one hour, and Anki will not push the actual review date out to next month. You are essentially using Anki as a digital stack of paper cards.

For those who struggle with focus, especially students dealing with ADHD and active recall, using Filtered Decks with a "Limit to" count of 50 cards helps prevent the feeling of being overwhelmed by a 2,000-card queue.

FSRS deep dive: Managing retention during a crisis

If you have updated to the Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler (FSRS), you have a new lever to pull: Desired Retention. This is a percentage that tells Anki how likely you want to be to remember a card. You can find more on this in the FSRS algorithm explanation.

Here is the mathematical trade-off: increasing your Desired Retention from 90% to 95% does not just add 5% more work. Because of the way the forgetting curve works, it can nearly double your daily workload. When you are cramming, you cannot afford a 95% retention rate. You are fighting for survival, not perfection.

During a cram session, drop your Desired Retention to 85% or 90%. This tells the algorithm to be less aggressive with reviews. You accept a slightly higher risk of forgetting a few cards in exchange for the ability to actually finish your deck before the exam starts. Once the exam is over, you can move it back to 90% for long-term maintenance.

To optimize this, go to Deck Options > FSRS and adjust the slider. If you have already spent a few days cramming, click "Optimize" to let the algorithm adjust to your current (likely stressed) performance levels.

The biology of the cram: Why this works

You might wonder why we are ignoring the "spaced" part of spaced repetition. The answer lies in the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. Without reinforcement, you lose about 50% of new information within an hour. By the end of a day, you are down to 30% retention. This is why the "Hail Mary" settings use 10-minute and 120-minute steps.

By hitting the card at the exact moment it is about to vanish from your short-term memory, you create a temporary "spike" in recall. While this is not as durable as long-term potentiation (LTP), it is sufficient for an exam that occurs in 48 hours. As noted by Language Locale, the most effective time to create these cards is during the initial learning phase, but if you are already in the cram window, the goal shifts from "learning" to "recognition."

To maximize this, avoid the "illusion of competence." This happens when you see a card, think "I know this," and hit "Good" without actually reciting the answer. In a cram session, you must be brutal. If you hesitated for more than two seconds, hit "Again."

Post-cram recovery: Fixing your deck

Once the exam is over, you will likely have a mess. If you used Filtered Decks without rescheduling, your main deck is still waiting for you. If you modified your main settings, your ease factors are skewed.

To fix this, do not just start reviewing. First, reset your settings to the "Optimization Guide" standards. If you have a massive backlog of "overdue" cards from your cramming period, do not try to do them all in one day. Use the "Limit to" feature in a Filtered Deck to tackle 100 cards a day until the backlog is gone. This prevents burnout and allows you to return to a sustainable rhythm.

If you used a lot of add-ons to manage your cramming, such as those found in the best Anki plugins list, make sure to check if any of them are still running automatic scripts that might interfere with your long-term scheduling.

How StudyCards AI fits in

The biggest bottleneck in cramming is not the reviewing, it is the card creation. You cannot spend six hours making cards when you only have 48 hours until the test. StudyCards AI removes this friction by converting your PDFs and lecture notes into high-quality flashcards instantly. Instead of spending your limited time typing, you can spend it in the "Hail Mary" Filtered Deck, actually memorizing the material.

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