THE METHOD

They're not cheat sheets

Despite the name. Each guide is a memorization system, and the heart of it isn't the reference pages or the exam tips. It's a set of practice sheets you fill in by hand, over and over, until you don't need them anymore.

What's actually in a guide

Most of the study guides I found, teaching myself and later tutoring, were the textbook condensed. A summary is a cheat sheet you can’t bring into the exam. It tells you what’s true without helping you remember any of it. Others were the same facts with butterflies behind the amino acids. Pretty, but no help remembering them or seeing how they connect.

Mine have extras too: pKa tables, MCAT traps, exam pearls, the things worth having on the desk beside you. They’re useful. They’re not the system. The system is the practice sheets. Print them as many times as you like. You’re going to need a lot of them.

Four sheets, one layer at a time

Here's the amino acid guide, sheet by sheet. Every guide works the same way.

Full reference

Everything is there: names, three-letter and one-letter codes, color groups. Your job is to draw every structure.

The pathway guides add one more habit. Every reaction is broken out and drawn on its own, substrate to product, before you see the whole cycle the way the textbook draws it. It feels slower than it needs to be. It's a big part of why it works.

Amino acid guide practice sheets, from full reference to blank.
Amino acid guide practice sheets, from full reference to blank.

SHEET 1

SHEET 2

Three-letter codes only

Gly, Ala, Val and the rest stay on the page. You supply the full name, the one-letter code and the structure.

Amino acid guide practice sheets, from full reference to blank.
Amino acid guide practice sheets, from full reference to blank.
Amino acid guide practice sheets, from full reference to blank.
Amino acid guide practice sheets, from full reference to blank.

SHEET 3

One-letter codes only

Now it's just G, A, V, W. Everything else comes from memory.

Amino acid guide practice sheets, from full reference to blank.
Amino acid guide practice sheets, from full reference to blank.

SHEET 4

Blank

Only the colors are left. When you can fill this one in, you know them. The extra blank sheets at the back are for doing it again until it's automatic.

How to use it

Work through the whole packet in order, Sheet 1 to Sheet 4, without looking back. Then do it again. When I was learning this, I'd go through three to five packets a day, often split into three or four short sessions instead of one long one.

The first day feels clumsy. By day three you'll notice yourself filling things in before you look. By day four or five, you have it.

Here's the part that surprised me: you can half zone out while you copy, and it still works. It's part muscle memory, part visual memory, and your brain does more of the work than you'd expect. What it can't do is learn from sheets you never fill in. The guides don't do anything sitting in a folder. Do the reps, and trust it.

A word about Anki

I’m a big Anki fan. My standard line as a tutor was that if Quizlet is a kayak, Anki is an aircraft carrier. I used it for every subject, and in anatomy, where most structures can’t reasonably be drawn by hand, image cards carried me. Most medical students use it, and I’d use it for nearly every course you take.

Organic chemistry and biochemistry are different. Flipping cards trains recognition: you see a structure and know it. Exams ask you to produce it, and that’s what the sheets train. Once you can draw something from a blank page, Anki is a great way to keep it and to drill the facts around it in both directions. Used first, it’s a trap. It feels like studying, the same way it did in anatomy, but in these two courses that feeling lasts right up until the exam.

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