Studying medicine in PASS and LAS, then for the EDN

Since the 2020 reform, PACES (the former single first-year health exam) no longer exists. Students now enter health studies through PASS (parcours d'accès spécifique santé, a dedicated health access track) or through a LAS (licence avec option accès santé, a bachelor's degree in another field with a health option). The principle remains selective: limited seats, a ranking, and exams often in multiple-choice format.

Three things change compared with high school:

• The volume: biochemistry, cell biology, anatomy, physiology, biophysics, statistics, public health; each subject brings dozens of pages every week.
• The time span: what you learn in September comes up in December or in May. Rereading the night before is no longer enough.
• The format: an MCQ does not ask you to recount the course, it asks you to recognize the exact detail, quickly, without hesitating between two similar options.

The method below answers these three constraints. It also holds for the rest of the program: in the second cycle (the clinical years of medical school), the EDN (épreuves dématérialisées nationales) replaced the ECN, and the problem stays the same, only bigger: retain an enormous amount, for a long time, and recall it under time pressure.

Copying a 40-page handout into summary sheets takes a huge amount of time and teaches little. Work directly on the handout:

• Highlight with a color code that stays the same all year: for example yellow for definitions, green for numerical values, red for the traps pointed out in lectures.
• Add as comments what the professor said out loud that is not written down.
• Write on a sticky note the questions you have, so you can settle them in peer tutoring or in tutorial sessions.

The annotated handout becomes your single reference. To go further on how to work with a PDF, see our guide to annotating a lecture PDF.

The same day as the lecture, or the next day at the latest. That is the rule that makes the difference. A card made while the lecture is fresh takes two minutes. A card made three weeks later means rereading everything.

A few examples of good PASS cards:

• Biochemistry: “Rate-limiting enzyme of glycolysis?” (answer: phosphofructokinase 1).
• Cell biology: a cloze deletion on the stages of mitosis, one blank per stage.
• Anatomy: a diagram of the brachial plexus whose labels you hide one by one.
• Biophysics: a formula with its units, written properly rather than approximately.

One idea per card, one short, checkable answer. If a card asks you to recite a paragraph, split it into three. Our guide to making good flashcards covers these rules in detail.

Through spaced repetition. The idea is old: Ebbinghaus described the forgetting curve as early as 1885, and research on the spacing effect (Cepeda et al., 2006) shows that spreading out reviews works better than cramming them together. In practice, each card comes back just before the moment you would have forgotten it: the next day, then a few days later, then weeks later.

Day to day, you no longer decide what to review: you do the cards the algorithm shows you each day. Twenty to forty minutes a day, every day, beats entire weekends of catching up. To understand the mechanism, read our page on spaced repetition.

Cards make you remember. MCQs teach you to answer under real conditions. You need both.

• Always time yourself. Getting a question right in ten minutes when it deserves one is useless on exam day.
• Go back over every mistake: why the option was wrong, which sentence of the handout said so.
• Turn recurring mistakes into cards, so they keep coming back until you have them down.
• Take a full mock exam a few weeks before the end-of-semester exams, to test your endurance.

Our guide to practicing multiple-choice questions gives a step-by-step correction method.

Start from the exam date and work backward. Count the days left, remove the ones when you will not study (peer tutoring, placements, rest), then spread out the subjects. Keep the last two or three weeks for MCQs and mock exams, not for discovering new lectures.

The planner does not replace the day's cards: it comes on top of them. Our page on the exam study planner offers a template.

Mnemesia was created for this exact pace, by Raphaël, engineer and medical student. It is free, needs no account, works offline, and your courses stay on your device.

• Your handouts are organized by year, semester, subject and group, in a real folder on your computer. You can import a whole folder at once.
• The highlighter has six colors, with a freehand pencil for the Apple Pencil, notes in the margin and sticky notes. Crop a diagram from the handout to turn it straight into a card, for example as an image occlusion.
• Each handout has its own “notes and mistakes” deck for what you get wrong.
• Cards (front and back, cloze deletion, image occlusion, formulas) are scheduled by FSRS, and your Anki decks import as .apkg files.
• MCQ sets and mock exams are timed, with a detailed correction and missed questions to go over again. You write them by hand or trade them with other students, as a single file.
• The planner spreads your review load up to your exams, based on your timetable imported as an .ics file.

Mnemesia is available on Mac and iPad (App Store), Windows, Linux and Android tablets: download it here.