For anyone with an exam date

Your unfair advantage.

Everyone else is rereading and highlighting, the methods research rates weakest. You'll be pulling answers from memory, with each card coming back just before you'd forget it. Ready-made for your exam. A few minutes a day.

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Free to start, no card needed · 7 days free on All-Access · one exam from $3.99

Same chapter, same week. The meters are an illustration of the method; the closing number is a published finding, cited in the film.

exam programs: 89; exam programs
ready-made cards: 97,000+; ready-made cards
a session: 5 min; a session
free on All-Access: 7 days; free on All-Access

Why it's unfair

The most popular ways to study are the weakest.

Rereading, highlighting and cramming feel productive. The research behind each swap below says the alternative holds up far better, and it's exactly what NoReread has you do.

Rereading

Familiar text feels like knowledge. Recognising a page isn't the same as producing the answer when the exam asks for it.

Retrieve it

Tested students recalled 61% of a passage a week later; students who reread it four times recalled 40%.

Roediger & Karpicke (2006), Psychological Science

Highlighting

Colouring a line is a decision about the page, not practice remembering it. A week later the highlight is still there; the fact often isn't.

Test yourself

A review of ten techniques rated highlighting and rereading low utility, and practice testing high.

Dunlosky et al. (2013), Psychological Science in the Public Interest

Cramming

One long night puts a lot in short-term memory, and much of it is gone by the time the exam, or the job, needs it.

Space it

Word pairs reviewed across four days were recalled 54% of the time; the stack crammed the day before the test, 34%.

Kornell (2009), Applied Cognitive Psychology

The receipts

Published finding about the method, not NoReread results. Each one is shown with the conditions it was measured under.

~80% vs 36%

recalled a week later: kept testing vs only restudied

Getting an answer right once isn't the end. Pairs that kept being tested were the ones still there a week later.

College students learned 40 Swahili–English word pairs. Pairs that kept being tested after first recall were recalled about 80% of the time a week later; pairs dropped from testing but restudied, 36%.

Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968.

Published finding about the method, not NoReread results.

54% vs 21%

recalled on day 5: one stack reviewed daily vs stacks crammed

Same cards, same number of reviews. Spreading them over days beat cramming them by a wide margin.

25 students learned GRE-type word pairs over four daily sessions with the same number of study trials. One large stack reviewed every day: 54% recalled on day 5. Small stacks each crammed on a single day: 21%. The stack crammed the day before the test: 34%. Experiment 2.

Kornell, N. (2009). Optimising learning using flashcards: Spacing is more effective than cramming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(9), 1297–1317.

Published finding about the method, not NoReread results.

90%

of learners did better with spacing, while most believed cramming worked better

Spacing feels harder while you do it, which is why most people choose cramming. The difficulty is the point.

Across three flashcard experiments, spacing beat massing for 90% of participants, yet after the first session 72% believed massing had been more effective.

Kornell, N. (2009). Optimising learning using flashcards: Spacing is more effective than cramming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(9), 1297–1317.

Published finding about the method, not NoReread results.

The forgetting curve, with and without reviews

An illustrative model, not measured data: after one exposure, memory decays quickly toward zero over 30 days. With reviews on days 1, 3, 7 and 14, each review restores it and it decays more slowly each time, staying high at day 30.

Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Über das Gedächtnis. Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig.

Illustrative model, not measured data.

Testing yourself beats rereading, a week later

Bar charts from Roediger & Karpicke (2006), Experiment 2. Five minutes after studying, students who read a passage four times recalled 83%, read three times and tested once 78%, read once and tested three times 71%. One week later the order reversed: 40%, 56% and 61%.

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.

Published finding about the method, not NoReread results.

Spacing beats cramming

From Kornell (2009), Experiment 2: over four days, one stack of 20 word pairs reviewed every day versus four stacks of five each crammed on one day. On day 5, spaced pairs were recalled 54% of the time, massed 21%, and the stack crammed the day before 34%. Across three experiments spacing beat massing for 90% of participants, yet after the first session 72% believed massing worked better.

Kornell, N. (2009). Optimising learning using flashcards: Spacing is more effective than cramming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(9), 1297–1317.

Published finding about the method, not NoReread results.

All the research, with full citations →

How NoReread puts it to work

1. Cards from public exam outlines

Each program is organised by its exam's publicly available outline, so the decks follow the structure you will be tested on.

2. Recall first, then flip

Every card asks before it tells. That moment of pulling the answer from memory is the retrieval practice the research measures.

3. Reviews scheduled before you forget

An SM-2 schedule brings each card back just as it starts to fade: sooner if you missed it, later if you knew it.

Try it: answer in your head, then tap to flip.