Encodr vs. studying straight from the textbook

Nobody's arguing the textbook is wrong. The question is whether reading it, even multiple times, is an effective way to remember what's in it - and the research here is pretty settled.

Re-reading feels like progress and mostly isn't

The more you re-read a chapter, the more familiar it feels, and that familiarity gets misread as knowledge. Why re-reading your notes doesn't work and why feeling confident doesn't mean you know it both cover the same underlying problem: recognizing a passage as familiar and being able to produce the fact cold, without the text in front of you, are different skills, and only the second one is what an exam actually tests.

What retrieval practice adds

The testing effect is one of the more robustly replicated findings in learning research - actively retrieving a fact (quizzing yourself) builds a stronger, more durable memory than passively re-reading the same fact, even when the re-reading takes longer. A flashcard forces retrieval by design; a textbook page doesn't unless you deliberately close it and quiz yourself, which almost nobody consistently does on their own.

Where a sourced deck earns the "textbook accuracy" part

The trade-off usually assumed is that flashcards are faster but less rigorous than the source material. A deck like the Ultimate MCAT Deck or the Texas P&C licensing deck is built specifically to close that gap - every card traces to a real source, the same standard the textbook itself is built on, so you're not trading accuracy for retrieval practice. You're getting both, instead of choosing between "read the accurate thing slowly" and "quiz yourself on something less rigorous."

The textbook still has a job

A flashcard is a bad way to first encounter a genuinely new, complex concept - you need the fuller explanation, the worked example, the surrounding context a textbook provides before a card testing that concept means anything. The realistic workflow isn't "textbook or flashcards," it's textbook first for anything genuinely new, then flashcards to make it stick instead of fading the way a single read-through always does.