If you are reading this then I will assume you already know what Anki is. If not, please see the Anki Manual; it is an excellent flashcard system for memorising factual content for the sciences.

I study Physics, Computer Science and Mathematics; I use Anki with all of these subjects, however my Anki deck for Maths is very small compared to the others since the subject is more focused on application rather than pure facts. Consequentially, I will only talk about my Physics and Computer Science decks here.

Use Subdecks or Tags?

This is a much-contested topic, and there are reasons to support each approach. Essentially, you can either organise your cards by creating an individual deck for each topic nested into a deck for each section or tag each card individually with the topic and section, placed in a single, subject-wide deck.

Personally, I organise my cards with tags, for the following reasons:

• The "custom study" feature, which I use when preparing for topic exams, was designed for use with the tag system and as such is much easier to use this way; if I want to revise only certain topics from within a section, I can do this in a way which is not possible by simply studying from a subdeck.
• It makes mass-editing cards easier as multiple tags can be removed and added to cards en masse, by tag. For example, if there is a test coming up on five topics (not necessarily sequential in the specification) I can select all cards with these tags and add one tag to all of them which I can use to study them.
• It is possible to organise cards by more than one metric. I will get onto this later, but essentially they can be sorted by both specification point and textbook chapter.
• On the Android app, it displays the current deck name (which would be the topic when using a subdeck approach) at the top of the screen. For certain questions, this can be quite revealing of the answer to a question, and so could impact your learning experience.

When creating cards, the current tags are kept along the bottom of the adding window, and if you move onto a new topic you can simply change the relevant tag at the bottom.

Physics

For Physics, I sort my cards by both textbook chapter and specification point. This is because my teachers like to assign work based on the textbook but I prefer to sort my content based on the specification. When creating my cards, this means having a copy of the textbook open, as well as the Physics specification and my source of notes, from which I change the question's tags when relevant.

This sounds like quite a lot of effort, and I thought so too when I first looked at doing it, but it's really not too much more work for much greater convenience when trying to review the cards. As you will see if you try this method, the textbooks mostly work through the specification points sequentially.

Computer Science

Here I only sort by specification point as this is also how it's done in class. There isn't much more to say for this other than to remember that specification point numbering systems will often overlap between subjects, and so you should determine a prefix for each subject to put before the tag names. Personally I put a p before the Physics specification points and leave the Computer Science ones as normal, but there is no logical reasoning to this (I probably just made the Computer Science ones first!)

Some More Tips

All of my subjects require flashcards consisting of mathematical equations. I prefer to make these using LaTeX (it is essentially a system that allows the markup of Maths in computer systems). I use the addon Markdown and KaTeX Support, which adds two note types (one for basic cards and one for Cloze) which allow mathematical strings to be directly input to the cards, which makes the cards look much nicer than writing it inline.