Pricing
Sign in

How to study in PA school

3 playbooks · any PA program

The didactic year is not one exam you cram for. It is a stack of courses, each graded in its own shape — typically a written exam and a lab practical in gross anatomy, often a single cumulative board-style exam in immunology and genetics, and a run of quizzes and unit exams in physiology. Studying them all the same way is an easy early mistake. Each playbook below is written to one course's usual shape — what decides the grade, a weekly loop that fits around lectures, and an honest FAQ. None of them names a school, a syllabus, or a date; where your program's syllabus says otherwise, the syllabus wins.

How the playbooks are meant to be used

Every playbook's week comes down to the same three beats:

  1. 1

    Lecture. Turn the week's material into something you can test yourself on the same day, while it is fresh and before it becomes a backlog. Each playbook says what that looks like for its course.

  2. 2

    Drill. Short, frequent retrieval beats long re-reading: flashcards on a spaced schedule, practice questions, and — for anatomy — naming structures from memory. The subject guides carry drills built for exactly this.

  3. 3

    Exam. Sit a timed, mixed set before the real one, then go back to what you missed. A miss caught a week early is worth more than a perfect score on material you already knew.

Practicals and written exams are different skills

A written exam asks you to reason from a question stem to an answer. A lab practical usually asks you to name a tagged structure in front of you, under a clock, with no answer choices. Reading the textbook for a practical, or flash-carding labels for a mechanism-heavy written exam, are the two classic mismatches. The anatomy playbook treats the two as separate courses; the immunology & genetics and physiology playbooks are written for board-style multiple choice.

Which one first?

Start with whichever course has the next exam. Many programs open with gross anatomy and run physiology alongside it, with immunology and genetics as a short course early in the year — but the order varies. If medical vocabulary still slows you down, give the word parts a few evenings alongside it: every lecture in every course is written in them.

A study aid, not medical advice, and not a substitute for your program's syllabus or faculty. Grading rules vary — read yours.

Related: Anatomy by region · Immunology & genetics · Physiology · PANCE body systems · Guide & FAQ