Studying in prépa and for competitive exams without losing your first year
In classes préparatoires (France's two-year preparatory classes for the grandes écoles), the competitive exam covers two years of syllabus. What you learn in September of your first year must still be there in the spring of your second. Here is how to hold on over time, between khôlles (weekly oral quizzes), DS (in-class timed tests) and homework assignments.
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Why does prépa call for a memorization method?
Whether you are in a science prépa (MPSI, PCSI, MP2I, BCPST), a business and economics prépa (ECG) or a humanities prépa (hypokhâgne and khâgne), you face the same challenge: a dense syllabus, a relentless pace, and a competitive exam that tests everything at the end.
Understanding is at the heart of prépa, and no card replaces an exercise you struggled with for an hour. But many failures come from something else: a fuzzy definition in a khôlle, a theorem where you forgot one hypothesis, a date missing from a history paper. That is memory, and it can be trained.
How do you prepare for khôlles effectively?
A khôlle often starts with a question on the course: state a theorem, give a definition, redo a proof from the syllabus. That is where cards help the most.
- Mathematics: “Statement of Rolle's theorem, with its hypotheses?” On the back, the full statement: f continuous on [a, b], differentiable on ]a, b[, f(a) = f(b).
- Physics: the expression of a law with its units, for example the period of a simple pendulum in the small-oscillation approximation.
- Chemistry: the definition of a redox couple, the writing conventions.
- Proofs: one card per key step, rather than a “redo the proof” card that is impossible to grade.
Before each khôlle, take a self-test on the chapter being examined. You will immediately know what is missing.
Can you make flashcards with mathematical formulas?
Yes, and they need to be well written. An approximate formula (“sum from k=1 to n”) is hard to learn. A properly typeset formula reads just like in your course: the power series expansion of the exponential, a Gaussian integral, a Maxwell relation.
Keep one rule: one formula per card, with its conditions of validity on the back. In mathematics, forgetting the hypothesis counts as much as forgetting the formula.
How do you remember dates, vocabulary and general knowledge?
In ECG prépa, in khâgne or for a civil service competitive exam, a large part of the exam relies on precise knowledge:
- History: “Treaty of Rome establishing the EEC: year?” (1957). “Maastricht Treaty: year of signing?” (1992).
- Geopolitics: rigorously defined concepts, figures and examples taken from your courses.
- Modern languages: thematic vocabulary and the turns of phrase for translation into and out of French. See our page on learning vocabulary.
- General culture: the authors, works and quotations you want to use in essays, with their context.
For civil service exams, the same principles apply to institutions, major laws and public finance concepts, according to your exam's syllabus.
How do you retain two years of syllabus without forgetting everything?
That is exactly the problem spaced repetition solves. A card you know well comes back less and less often: after a few months, it costs you only a few seconds per term. A difficult card comes back more often, until you have it down. Research on the spacing effect (Cepeda et al., 2006) shows that this spreading out improves long-term retention.
The result: in your second year, your first-year deck keeps running in the background, for a few minutes a day. When it is time to study for the competitive exam, you are not relearning, you are consolidating. All the details on spaced repetition.
How do you organize your studying between DS and the competitive exam?
Free time is rare in prépa. The most realistic approach is a fixed slot of fifteen to twenty minutes a day for cards, often in the morning or during your commute, then the rest of the time for exercises.
Before a DS or a mock exam, review the decks for the relevant syllabus together. To build a schedule over several weeks, our page on the exam study planner adapts very well to DS. And to understand why quizzing yourself beats rereading, see active recall.
How do you do all this in Mnemesia?
- Write your formulas neatly formatted in your cards, just like in your course.
- Sort your decks by subject and by chapter, and let FSRS schedule their return over two years.
- Before a khôlle, launch a self-test graded out of 20: it does not disturb your schedule.
- Before a DS, review several decks together with “Review for exams”.
- Store your handouts and answer keys as PDFs, annotate them, and crop a diagram to make it into a card.
- Share your decks with your classmates as a single file.
Free, no account, no ads, offline: download Mnemesia on Mac, iPad, Windows, Linux or Android tablet.
Frequently asked questions
Are flashcards useful in a science prépa?
Yes, for definitions, theorem statements with their hypotheses, and formulas. They do not replace exercises, but they keep you from losing points needlessly in a khôlle or a DS.
How many cards should you make per chapter?
As many as there are things you need to know exactly, and no more. A math chapter might yield about twenty cards, a history chapter many more. Avoid “the whole chapter” cards.
Should you keep your first-year cards going in your second year?
Yes. With spaced repetition, they rarely come back if you know them well, so they cost little time and save you from relearning everything before the competitive exam.
Does the method work for a civil service exam?
Yes. Institutions, public law, public finance and general culture lend themselves well to cards. Writing the note de synthèse (the document summary exercise) or the essay, however, is trained through writing.