The reason candidates forget Civil Law by the time they reach Criminal Law is not that they studied it badly. It is that they studied it once. Memory fades on a curve, and the only thing that flattens the curve is retrieving the material again at the moment it is about to be lost.
Spaced repetition is the deliberate version of that. It is not a flashcard app, and it is not an extra subject to study. It is a rule about the second and third time you meet something, and it is the highest-yield twenty minutes in a review day.
The principle, briefly
Two findings do all the work:
- Forgetting is predictable. Newly learned material decays steeply at first, then more slowly. Review too early and you waste the review; too late and you have to learn it again.
- Retrieving is what strengthens memory. Not re-reading — retrieving. The act of pulling a rule back out of memory, unaided, is what makes the next retrieval easier. Reading a summary again produces the feeling of knowing without the durability.
The practical consequence: a session where you close the book and reproduce the requisites, then check, teaches more than three sessions of reading them.
The interval schedule
Four touches, spaced roughly like this, are enough for review-year material:
| Touch | When | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | End of the study block | Write the rule from memory. Check. Fix. |
| 2 | Next day | Same, from memory, no notes. |
| 3 | Three days later | Same, plus one applied question. |
| 4 | Ten to fourteen days later | Same, plus a question that mixes it with another topic. |
After four clean touches, a doctrine goes on a "maintenance" list: once a month, in the consolidation phase, and once in the pre-week.
What you are aiming for is not a feeling of familiarity. It is the ability to produce the rule, its elements and an application without any prompt — the state that survives an examiner's question you did not expect.
What to put on a card
Cards should hold the smallest complete unit of examinable content. Three shapes work:
- Rule with elements. Front: "Requisites of a valid novation." Back: the four requisites, numbered.
- Distinction. Front: "Error in personae versus aberratio ictus." Back: the two definitions and the one-line consequence of each.
- Test + exception. Front: "When may a period be set aside?" Back: the rule, then the exception, then one fact pattern.
What does not work:
- Whole pages. A card with six paragraphs is a page you will never retrieve, only re-read.
- Yes/no prompts ("Is a contract void if…") — they let you guess and learn nothing.
- Cards you cannot answer. If a card fails three times, it is not a memory problem; it is a comprehension problem. Go back to the text, then rewrite the card smaller.
Physical cards, documents, or an app — does it matter?
Almost not at all. The interval is the active ingredient.
- Index cards are excellent for distinctions and elements, and physically sorting them into "today / in three days / next month" is a form of spaced repetition in itself.
- A single document with a table — doctrine, last test, next test, result — works for people who hate cards, and it doubles as a record of what you keep failing.
- An app automates the scheduling. Its risk is passivity: tapping "again" on a card teaches nothing if you never write the answer. Its advantage is that it will not let you skip the review.
Pick one, and make the rule absolute: the retrieval is written or spoken aloud, never merely thought. Thinking "yes, I know that" is recognition; writing the four requisites is retrieval.
The daily twenty minutes
The most valuable twenty minutes of a review day, and the first thing sacrificed when the day goes wrong:
- Yesterday (5 min). Write out, from memory, the two or three things you studied yesterday. Check. Note what failed.
- Last week (7 min). The same for the items whose three-day and ten-day touches fall today.
- Mixed question (8 min). One applied question drawn from a different subject than today's study block. This is the interleaving that the examination itself does: a sitting switches topics with no warning.
Put the twenty minutes at the start of the day, not the end. At the end it is optional; at the start it is simply what you do.
Where it fits in the year
Spaced repetition is cheap early and expensive to start late.
- While learning a subject, the four touches happen automatically: end of block, next day, three days, two weeks.
- While learning the next subject, the previous subject's maintenance touches continue at one a month. This is the mechanism that keeps eight subjects alive at once — the thing that feels impossible in August is a scheduling problem in January.
- In the consolidation phase, retrieval is the study. No new material; you work the maintenance list and the failure list.
The sequence matters: it is much easier to maintain a subject you learned properly than to resurrect one you only read.
The failure modes
Card hoarding. Making thousands of cards is a way of feeling productive without retrieving. If you have more cards than you can review in twenty minutes a day, you have too many cards. Cut them to the ones you keep failing.
Reviewing what you already know. Comfortable and worthless. Weight the list toward the failures; a clean card drops out of rotation.
Substituting spacing for understanding. Spacing fixes forgetting; it never fixes not having understood. If the rule does not make sense, no interval will save it.
Skipping the applied question. Elements memorised without application produce answers that state the rule and never use the facts — which is exactly the failure mode the answer structure is designed to prevent.
A note on honesty
The measure of whether this is working is not how many reviews you did. It is: on a day when you sit down with a blank page, can you produce the rule for a topic you last touched three weeks ago? Test that. If the answer is no, the schedule needs fixing, not the amount of reading.
For the surrounding plan — how many hours a subject gets, and when the consolidation phase starts — see the twelve-month review plan.