Nursing students use Anki in large numbers, but the experience is noticeably different from what medical students describe. The AnKing deck is built specifically for USMLE Step 1 content, and while it overlaps with nursing education in areas like pharmacology and pathophysiology, it does not cover NCLEX-specific content well. Nursing students who try to use medical student Anki resources often find themselves drilling content that their exam does not test while missing the clinical judgment frameworks and priority-setting questions that NCLEX emphasizes.
The alternative is to build your own Anki deck from scratch, which requires both the technical knowledge to use Anki effectively and a clear sense of what NCLEX actually tests. That combination is not common among first-year nursing students. The result is that many nursing students either invest significant time building decks of uneven quality or import poorly maintained shared decks that were created by students who may or may not have passed their boards.
Picmonic and Gridually both take different approaches that sidestep this problem. Picmonic uses visual story-based mnemonics specifically designed for nursing content. Gridually uses spatial grid-based review that can help with the classification tasks that appear heavily in NCLEX, like categorizing medications by drug class or organizing lab value ranges. Neither replaces NCLEX practice questions, but both are more directly useful than a general-purpose Anki configuration.
NCLEX is not a knowledge recall exam in the same way that Step 1 is. It tests clinical judgment - you often know all the facts relevant to a question and still get it wrong because you misapplied a prioritization framework. Standard Anki decks are built for knowledge recall. They drill facts. They are useful for memorizing normal lab values, drug classifications, and disease presentations, but they do not build the clinical reasoning skill that separates passing from failing on the newer Next Generation NCLEX format. Students who rely entirely on Anki for NCLEX prep often find the practice exams much harder than their card performance predicted. A content review tool like Picmonic or a question bank with rationale explanations needs to be running alongside any flashcard system.
Pharmacology is where nursing students most consistently report that spatial or visual memory tools outperform standard card review. The challenge is not memorizing individual drugs. It is building a mental map of drug classes, mechanism categories, and contraindication patterns that lets you reason about an unfamiliar drug by inferring from its class. Anki cards present drugs one at a time and do not reinforce the relational structure between them. Gridually's grid format lets you place related drugs in adjacent cells so spatial proximity reflects pharmacological relationship. Several nursing students have reported that reviewing drug classifications this way made the pharmacology section of NCLEX feel more manageable than card-by-card drilling had.
Aphantasic medical students achieve comparable or higher grades (Taylor & Laming, 2025). Spatial encoding provides an alternative memorization pathway for anatomy, pharmacology, and case law. This is relevant beyond aphantasia: any learner studying structured professional material benefits from spatial organization that mirrors how the subject is actually structured.
Anki is useful for nursing study but requires more setup and critical judgment than most students realize. Generic medical decks do not serve NCLEX prep well, and building custom decks is time-intensive. For students who want a lower-friction start, Picmonic for mnemonics and Gridually for drug classifications are worth the investment. Combine any of these with a dedicated NCLEX question bank for the clinical reasoning practice that flashcards cannot replace. Gridually's spatial encoding is based on memory research from the University of Chicago, University of Bonn, and Macquarie University.
Gridually's spatial grids work well for nursing content that has natural groupings - drug classifications, lab values by system, assessment frameworks. Anki is powerful but requires setup. Picmonic uses visual mnemonics specifically for nursing and medical content. SimpleNursing combines video lectures with practice questions.
Focus on drug classifications, lab values, and assessment prioritization. Spatial grids help by grouping related drugs or lab values together so you see patterns - cardiac drugs in one cluster, renal values in another. This mirrors how clinical reasoning works better than randomized flashcard review.
Yes. Drug classifications are naturally spatial - grouping drugs by class, mechanism, and system in a grid lets you see relationships between medications. This helps with identifying drug interactions and understanding why certain drugs are prescribed together.