Memorisation Techniques: The Science Behind SQE Flashcards

Understanding How Memory Works

Success in the Solicitor's Qualifying Examination (SQE) relies on more than just hard work—it depends on what you actually retain. 

In this guide, we explore evidence-based techniques, like active recall and spaced repetition, that help you move information into long-term memory and keep it there.

The Forgetting Curve

One of the core considerations that any learning strategy needs to address is the ‘Forgetting Curve.’ This was discovered by a 19th-century psychologist called Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Over several studies, Ebbinghaus discovered that, after a single learning session, humans are likely to forget 90% of the material within a month. The first few days saw most of the information being forgotten, with later days and weeks showing a much slower rate of forgetting.

What Ebbinghaus’s findings prove is that the first day or two after learning is absolutely crucial to retaining new information.

This is particularly important for SQE1, where the volume of material is substantial and retention is key to success.

Memory Processes: Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval

There are 3 main processes that characterise how memory works: encoding, storage and retrieval.

Think of learning like putting things inside your backpack:

• Encoding is when you first put something into your backpack
• Storage is whether it stays in the backpack while you walk
• Retrieval is your ability to quickly find what you’re looking for

Unfortunately, unlike a backpack, our memory typically only holds onto about 5% of the things we put in it, unless we routinely reach out to look for them. That’s why active strategies are essential for SQE 1 preparation.

Types of Memory

For students preparing for SQE1, it’s important to grasp that there are different types of memory:

• Declarative memory (conscious memory) includes:
  • Semantic memory: Facts like legal definitions, rules, and principles (e.g., the elements of negligence in Tort Law)
  • Episodic memory: Personal recollections (e.g., remembering the lecture where you learned about conveyancing procedures)
• Procedural memory (unconscious memory) includes:
  • Skills and habits (e.g., how to analyse a case or draft a legal document)

Recognising these distinctions helps you select appropriate learning techniques for different types of SQE1 content.

Spaced Repetition

Clearly, the forgetting curve presents a problem to those of us trying to learn. How can we prevent that massive loss of information in the first few days?

The golden rule to embed new information in long-term memory is ‘spaced repetition.’ This is a study technique that involves actively testing yourself on material over increasing intervals of time.

Effective spaced repetition relies on active recall – retrieving information from your brain rather than simply recognising it on a page.

For example, after studying contract remedies, close your SQE notes and list all the types of remedies and their requirements from memory.

This process of self-testing forces your brain to work harder, creating stronger memory pathways.

Expanding Retrieval

The optimal learning schedule is one where the intervals between these active recall sessions become increasingly longer.

Take Employment Law, for instance: after learning the rules for dismissal, test yourself with some MCQs the next day, then three days later, then a week after that.

As exam day approaches and recall becomes easier, reviews can be spaced further apart.

This is called ‘expanding retrieval.’ It works because retrieving information after you’ve started to forget it requires more mental effort and allows you to go back through the consolidation process again.

Many SQE candidates find that spaced repetition helps them retain even the finer details under pressure, significantly improving their chances of passing their exams.

Repetition Tools: SQE Flashcards and Practice Questions

To implement effective spaced repetition for SQE1, you’ll need both the right techniques and a strategic review schedule.

Digital tools like Anki, Quizlet, or Brainscape, can make 'expanding retrieval' easier by automatically adjusting the review timing based on your performance, showing you what you’re struggling with more often and spacing out material you’ve mastered. 

These tools can be used to create large decks of flashcards summarising key legal concepts. As one successful SQE1 candidate noted, 'I wish I’d started writing flashcards from the beginning and edited them as I went'—a solid reminder to start early rather than cramming later.

You will also find many pre-made SQE flashcard decks made by other students that are publicly available (here is one of our favourites).

Other practical recall techniques include:

• Using practice questions as a springboard for listing all the legal rules relevant to that case study
• Covering your notes and writing down what you remember
• Summarising each study session or a book chapter in one minute from memory
• Explaining complex ideas out loud, as if teaching someone else

Personalisation

As we have already emphasised, it’s important to be strategic about review frequency. The forgetting curve varies based on how well you already know the material and how difficult it is:

If you’ve already covered a topic of legal practice in Criminal Law or Business Law during an internship, a quick read-through now, followed by testing in four days and again in two to three weeks, may be enough.

More difficult or unfamiliar topics (like Property Law for many candidates) will need tighter review cycles with more frequent active recall.

To make the most of spaced repetition:

• Build an SQE revision schedule that cycles through all subjects rather than focusing exclusively on one area at a time
• Revisit each topic periodically (e.g., negligence a week after first study, then two weeks later)
• Use tools and online resources to automate review timing where possible
• Focus more frequent reviews on topics you find harder

Remember, this approach pays dividends beyond just SQE1. Since much of the material overlaps with SQE2, building it into long-term memory through spaced repetition means you won’t need to relearn everything later.

Cramming, by contrast, virtually guarantees you’ll need to start from scratch for SQE2.

Managing Cognitive Load

Cognitive Load Theory 

Cognitive load theory suggests that people have a limited amount of cognitive resources, or mental processing power, which affects how much information they can take in and remember at one time.

Working memory can store around 4 individual elements at a time. However, imagine you are learning a completely new legal concept—let’s say the rule against perpetuities in Trusts Law.

You might start learning about lives in being, 21 years, vesting of interests, and perpetual trusts. If you’re new to the topic, holding all these concepts simultaneously will create significant cognitive load.

To optimise learning and reduce cognitive load, several strategies can be applied:

• Pre-train with foundational concepts
  Before approaching complex doctrines, it helps to build up the necessary background knowledge. For instance, tackling perpetuities is far more manageable if you’re already comfortable with concepts like future interests and the basic mechanics of trust law. Without this groundwork, advanced topics will feel unnecessarily difficult.
• Use multimodal learning
  Since visual and auditory information are processed through different channels in working memory, combining them enhances learning. Watching a video on Civil Procedure while sketching out a timeline of the litigation process, for example, makes use of both channels and can improve comprehension and recall.
• Avoid split attention
  Learning is disrupted when related information is unnecessarily separated. When studying a flowchart of litigation stages, for example, the explanation of each step should appear directly on the diagram, rather than in a separate text box or glossary, so the learner isn’t forced to mentally integrate disconnected sources of information.

Chunking: Making Information Stick

One of the most effective ways to manage the sheer volume of information in SQE1 is through chunking—the process of grouping related pieces of information together so they can be stored as a single 'unit' in your memory.

Since working memory can typically only hold around 5–9 separate items at a time, chunking allows you to reduce cognitive load by organising multiple elements into one meaningful whole.

Think of how we remember the colours of the rainbow: listing out seven individual colours is demanding, but remembering the phrase 'Roy G Biv' instantly triggers recall of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

The mnemonic becomes a chunk—a single prompt that cues up a full set of details.

Chunking information about company structures and governance can also help in retaining complex legal concepts.

Mnemonics

Mnemonics are a powerful way of putting chunking into practice, especially when learning dense or list-based material. They help compress long or abstract information into something short, structured, and easy to remember.

Whether you’re memorising a legal list, a multi-factor test, or a procedural step, mnemonics serve as efficient mental handles. For instance, to recall the grounds for judicial review—illegality, irrationality, procedural impropriety, and human rights proportionality—a strange phrase like ‘Incredibly Irrational Purple Hippo’ may help trigger the right words during recall. The weirder, more personal or more vivid, the better.

Acronyms serve a similar function. One SQE1 candidate recalled using 'PAIR' to memorise the duties of a trustee: Protect assets, Act impartially, Invest prudently, and exercise Reasonable skill and care. This compressed a complex list into a single, easy-to-remember term.

Importantly, creating your own mnemonics is more effective than memorising someone else’s. The act of generating the phrase forces you to engage with the material actively, and the final result is more personally meaningful, making it easier to retain. You might develop mnemonics or acronyms to help with:

• Elements of offences in Criminal Law
• Multi-factor tests in Contract or Tort
• Procedural steps in Property Practice
• Requirements for legal defences
• Ethical principles in Professional Conduct

Used well, chunking and mnemonics can significantly reduce mental effort, allowing you to store more information without overwhelming your working memory—exactly the kind of edge you want going into SQE1.

As a challenge, try creating your own mnemonic for the elements of negligence (duty, breach, causation, and damage) or the requirements for a valid contract (offer, acceptance, consideration, and intention to create legal relations).

What strange or memorable phrase could help you remember them instantly under pressure?

Elaborative Encoding and Memory Palaces

Elaborative encoding is a kind of compression, but it actually works by adding more information, not less. The aim is to align new information with images and places that you know well, to minimise the cognitive energy required to memorise it.

The most effective and well-known of elaborative encoding techniques is to associate abstract information with a familiar physical space. This is what is sometimes known as the ‘Mind Palace’ technique.

To create your own mind palace, you need to imagine a building you are very familiar with – many people choose their childhood home – and ‘place’ bits of information in particular rooms of the building.

For example, if you wanted to recall the priority order of creditors in insolvency law for SQE1, you could imagine entering your home and seeing different creditors in different rooms:

• Fixed charge holders sitting comfortably in the living room (first priority)
• Expenses of liquidation being calculated at the kitchen table (second priority)
• Preferential creditors waiting in the hallway (third priority)
• Floating charge holders floating around upstairs (fourth priority)
• Unsecured creditors crowded in the garage (fifth priority)
• Shareholders standing outside in the garden (last priority)

This is most effective when combined with visualisation, making the images memorable and connected to the legal concepts.

The Importance of Variation

Interleaving

Rather than sticking to one subject for long blocks of time (known as 'blocked practice'), it’s more effective to mix subjects within your daily study routine—a technique called interleaving.

Interleaving is a learning strategy that involves switching between topics and ideas in a short space of time. It sounds counterintuitive, but jumping between topics has been found to improve recall by about 40%.

While interleaving initially feels more difficult than blocked practice (and may lead to more mistakes during practice), research shows it leads to better long-term learning and improved performance on tests.

Interleaving works because it:

• Forces your brain to continuously retrieve different types of information
• Prevents the false confidence that comes from blocked practice

Implementing Interleaving in SQE Revision

When it comes to SQE1 revision, interleaving has the additional benefit of helping to build the mental agility needed for exam day, where questions appear in a random order.

In the exam, you might go from a Land Law question to Criminal Practice, then Dispute Resolution—all within a few minutes. It is important to be able to mentally jump from subject to subject

So, instead of spending a full week on Tort before switching to Criminal Law, try breaking your day into focused sessions on different but related areas.

For example, study Contract Law remedies in the morning, then move to Negligent Misstatement in Tort—both involving duties and loss. Later, switch to Misrepresentation, which ties closely to both.

Grouping topics like this also strengthens conceptual links between different areas of law and mirrors how issues can overlap in real practice.

Varying Your Learning Environment

How often have you been told to create a dedicated space for work or study to boost your learning and recall? Maybe you’ve been told that you should turn your desk into a perfect distraction-free utopia.

Well, the research shows this may not be such a good idea.

In 1978, a trio of psychologists led by senior lecturer Robert Bjork gave 2 groups of college students a list of 40 vocabulary words to revise. One group was instructed to study in a single room, and the other group was instructed to divide their study sessions between 2 rooms.

The researchers then tested both groups to see how much of the material they had retained and found that the students who studied in 2 rooms performed far better than the students who studied the same words twice, in the same room.

What was happening here? According to the study’s authors, when the external context is varied, the information we take in is enriched, which slows down forgetting. This, they asserted, is because the brain subtly associates what it is studying with the background sensations it has while learning.

For SQE prep, this means occasionally changing where you study—perhaps alternating between home, the library, and a quiet café. This simple change can strengthen memory formation and make your knowledge more resilient.

Summary: 

1. Most forgetting happens within 48 hours.
   Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve shows we lose ~90% of new material within a month—so the first few days after learning are critical for review.
2. Spaced repetition fights forgetting best.
   Use expanding intervals (1 day, 3 days, 1 week) to revisit material just as it's fading. This strengthens retrieval pathways and promotes long-term retention.
3. Active recall outperforms passive review.
   Self-testing—e.g., listing legal concepts from memory, or using SQE flashcards—is far more effective than rereading. Reviewing why wrong MCQ options are incorrect reinforces understanding.
4. Cognitive load can be managed.
   Pre-train foundational concepts, avoid split attention (e.g. integrate diagrams with explanations), and use chunking to group related legal elements into one memory unit.
5. Mnemonics and memory palaces make rules and legal knowledge stick.
   Weird, personal acronyms (like 'Incredibly Irrational Purple Hippo') or spatial techniques (e.g. placing creditor types in different rooms) improve retention through vivid associations.
6. Interleaving and varied settings enhance flexibility.
   Mixing topics in short blocks boosts mental agility; studying in different locations improves recall by enriching contextual memory cues.