We're the team behind Flips, a flashcard app built around the idea of showing you a word right before you forget it. Few things frustrate exam students more than this: “I've gone through my college entrance exam wordlist five, six times — and words still keep leaking out.”
If that's you, the problem isn't effort. You're clearly putting in the passes. The problem is the way the passes are structured. In this article we'll explain why looping a wordlist over and over leaks vocabulary, and how to study so that what you learn holds all the way to exam day.
Why endless full passes leak words
A college entrance exam wordlist is long — often a couple thousand words. When you go through the whole thing in order, again and again, each full pass takes a long time. By the time you come back around to the words at the start, they've already begun to fade. You're always patching the front while the back leaks, and vice versa.
There's a second inefficiency. A flat pass gives the same attention to a word you've known cold for months as to one you miss every single time. A huge slice of every pass is spent re-confirming words you don't need to see — time you can't spare when an exam date is fixed.
Widen gaps on mastered words, hammer the unstable ones
The way to plug the leak is to stop treating every word equally. For words you've solidly learned, widen the gap before you see them again — they don't need frequent review and will hold for weeks. For words that haven't settled, bring them back soon and often. That single shift means each study session is spent where it actually moves your score.
The obstacle is bookkeeping. Across two thousand words, you cannot track which are stable, which are shaky, and when each is due. That's precisely what Flips automates. Based on the forgetting curve, it calculates the next review time for every word individually: answer correctly and the interval stretches; miss or hesitate and it comes back sooner. Your unstable words get hammered; your mastered ones quietly widen out of the way.
Keep building retention right up to the exam
Because Flips tracks each word's state, your study compounds instead of resetting. Early on you'll see a lot of words daily; as they stabilize, the daily load shrinks to just the words that genuinely need attention plus whatever is due. By the final weeks, your reviews are concentrated on the handful of stubborn words still slipping — exactly where last-stretch effort should go.
The answering keeps memory active. Card Mode has you recall the meaning before flipping; Quiz Mode gives four choices with instant feedback — both make you retrieve from your own head (active recall), which is what builds exam-durable recall rather than a vague sense of familiarity. You can create your own deck from your school's wordlist alongside the built-in standard decks, and Flips can notify you when reviews are due so a busy exam schedule doesn't let words quietly slip back out.
Endless full passes leak because they fight the forgetting curve. Widen the gaps on what you know, concentrate on what you don't, and let each word be scheduled for you — and the vocabulary will still be there on exam day.
Flips
The flashcard app that shows you words right before you forget them. Review timing managed automatically by the forgetting curve. Free to start.
Learn more about FlipsFrequently Asked Questions
Why do words keep leaking even after many full passes?
Because a long wordlist takes so long to loop that the early words fade before you circle back. You're always patching one end while the other leaks. Returning to fading words sooner, instead of looping everything, fixes it.
Is going through the wordlist in order a bad method?
It's inefficient because it gives equal attention to words you know cold and words you always miss. A big share of each pass is wasted re-confirming stable words. Concentrating on unstable words uses your limited time far better.
How should I study vocabulary in the final weeks before the exam?
Focus on the stubborn words still slipping rather than re-reading everything. If each word is scheduled individually, your final-stretch reviews naturally concentrate on what's weak plus whatever is due that day.
Can I use my school's wordlist in Flips?
Yes. You can create your own deck from your wordlist alongside the built-in standard decks, so your reviews match exactly the vocabulary your exam expects.