How Proa makes it stick.
Proa is a question bank with a memory system attached. This page explains exactly what that system does, so you can judge it before you pay for it.
Most of the effort is spent once and lost.
A resident preparing for boards answers somewhere between two and four thousand practice questions. You can measure what happens to that work yourself: take a question you answered six weeks ago and got right, and try to explain it now.
Without retrieval, memory for detailed material decays fast, and rereading an explanation feels like learning while doing almost nothing for recall. The standard answer in every other bank is to do the bank again.
- DueMissed on Feb 12First return · interval 6 days
- DueRight on Feb 20, low confidenceSecond return · interval 14 days
- DueMissed twice, Jan 30Third return · interval 3 days
- Apr 2Right on Mar 2Fourth return · interval 31 days
What you miss comes back before you forget it.
Every question you miss, and every question you get right without being sure, enters a schedule. Proa brings the concept back at the point where you are most likely to be about to forget it, not on a fixed weekly review.
The schedule is computed from your own answers, so two residents using the same bank see different questions on the same day.
Some things do not yield to understanding.
Doses, cutoffs, classification systems, diagnostic criteria, the order of steps. For those, Proa provides an encoded version built with the techniques used in memory competition, where arbitrary material is the whole sport.
You are not asked to invent the mnemonic. It comes with the question, and it enters the same retrieval schedule.
A plan that fits a clinical schedule.
Proa turns your exam date and the hours you actually have into a weekly plan of study blocks, and tracks what you complete. It assumes call nights, post-call days and weeks where nothing gets done, because that is the real shape of a residency.
Retrieval sessions are short and land on the days you have. New questions go where you have more.
Three of the best-documented findings in the science of learning.
The testing effect
Trying to recall something strengthens memory for it more than restudying it does. Answering questions is not just assessment. It is the learning.
Spacing
The same review, spread over time instead of concentrated, produces memory that lasts longer. The interval matters, and it should grow as the memory strengthens.
Retrieval beats review
Reading an explanation again produces a feeling of knowing that does not survive the exam. Retrieving it does.
A method with a name behind it.
The retention system was designed by Manu Vergara, memory world record holder and MSc in Neuroscience. Since 2021, hundreds of physicians have used it to memorize entire specialty syllabi and excel in their board exams. The medicine is written and reviewed by board-certified physicians.
Real questions, the method attached.
The free questions show the explanation, the encoded fact and when it would come back. No account, no card.