Comparisons
Rounds vs Anki: past-paper practice or a flashcard routine?
Start with Rounds when you have an exam paper you want to work through. Consider Anki when you want a collection of flashcards to revisit over time. Our view is that the most useful choice depends on the study task in front of you: practicing a complete question and maintaining a recall habit can serve different parts of the same course.
Product documentation checked . Recommendations reflect our assessment of these study workflows.
Two different starting points
Rounds starts with your paper: upload it into My Paths, review the extracted items, and practice with answers and explanations. Anki organizes study around decks of flashcards and schedules reviews using your recall feedback. Its official app also supports media, customizable card layouts, and add-ons.
| Study task | Rounds | Anki |
|---|---|---|
| Starting material | Your exam paper, with an optional course source for grounding | A deck of flashcards |
| A study session | Answer questions from an imported practice set | Review cards and rate your recall |
| Organization | Paths and practice sets for your exams | Decks for collections of cards |
| Customization | Review and edit the imported questions | Customize card layouts and extend features with add-ons |
When your next task is a past paper
Suppose you have a previous pathology exam and want to attempt its questions this afternoon. In Rounds, that paper becomes the starting point for a practice set. You can work through the stem and answer choices together, then read an explanation of the question you just attempted.
If you also have an assigned course handout, upload it as a source before processing the exam. Grounding gives Rounds that material to draw on when preparing answers and explanations. This is particularly relevant when you want the practice to follow the terminology and distinctions taught in your course.
Choose this workflow when the useful next step is to apply what you know to an existing question. Keep the original paper and its answer context together, then use the round to decide which concepts deserve another look.
When you want to build reusable recall prompts
Anki provides cloze cards, which hide part of a sentence, and image-occlusion cards, which hide regions of an image. These formats give you ways to turn a definition, relationship, or labeled diagram into a recall prompt. Its manual explains how to create and edit both.
A practical approach is to make each prompt answer one clear question. For example, after a practice session, identify a distinction you struggled to explain and write a short prompt about that distinction. This is an editorial suggestion for organizing your study, rather than a claim that one card format guarantees better results.
A way to use both in the same week
Try a round from your past paper, identify a few concepts worth remembering, and write your own flashcards for those concepts in Anki. Later, return to the paper or attempt an unfamiliar question to see whether you can apply the idea in context.
This is a suggested study routine, not an automatic Rounds-to-Anki integration. Keep the handoff selective: a few useful prompts are easier to maintain than copying every sentence of an explanation. You can also use either tool on its own if that better fits your existing routine.
For your next session, choose the concrete outcome first. If it is “attempt this exam paper,” try Rounds with one upload. If it is “revisit the facts in my deck,” use the flashcard routine you can keep returning to.
Put your next paper to work.
Upload an exam, check the questions, and try your first round. Core includes 10 exam pages per cycle, with no credit card required.
Try Rounds free