Flashcards help on the ExAC when you use them for spaced repetition: you try to recall each answer before you flip the card, and you come back to it after a gap of days rather than minutes. A 2013 review of ten study techniques rated only two of them high utility: practice testing and distributed practice. This guide from Examitect, an independent ExAC prep platform unaffiliated with the CACB, covers what a good ExAC card looks like, what to leave to the open-book code in Section 2, and a weekly routine that fits a 6 to 10 hour study week.
| Method | Retrieval practice (recall before you look) spread over days |
|---|---|
| Session length | 15 to 20 minutes, five days a week (our suggestion) |
| Weekly share | About 1.5 hours of a 6 to 10 hour study week |
| Best fit | Closed-book Sections 1, 3 and 4 |
| Section 2 | Concepts and where to look; numbers stay in the tabbed code |
Two ideas sit under every good flashcard routine. Retrieval practice means pulling an answer out of memory before you check it. Spaced repetition means coming back to the same item after a gap, so the reviews are spread out instead of bunched into one sitting. A flashcard is simply a tool that makes both easy.
In Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 study in Psychological Science (17(3), 249 to 255), students read prose passages and then either restudied them or took recall tests on them. On a test five minutes later, restudying came out ahead. On tests two days and one week later, the students who had practised recall retained substantially more, even though restudying made students more confident.
Karpicke and Roediger pushed the idea further in Science in 2008 (319, 966 to 968). Students learned 40 Swahili and English word pairs. Once a pair had been recalled correctly, some groups kept being tested on it and others dropped it from testing. A week later, the groups that kept testing recalled about 80% of the pairs; the groups that stopped testing recalled 36% and 33%. Extra study of pairs already learned produced practically no gain. All four groups had predicted they would recall about half.
Cepeda and colleagues' 2006 review in Psychological Bulletin (132(3), 354 to 380) pooled 839 assessments of distributed practice from 317 experiments. Studying an item on two separate occasions beat the same study time in one block at every retention interval they examined, from under a minute to over a month. They also found that the gap giving the best retention grows as the time until the test grows. For an exam weeks or months away, that points to gaps of days, not minutes.
Kornell tested this with flashcards specifically (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2009, 23(9), 1297 to 1317). Studying one large stack, which spaces each card further apart, beat studying four small stacks one after another, and spacing beat cramming on the last day. Spacing worked better for 90% of participants, yet after the first session 72% believed massing had worked better.
Dunlosky and colleagues' 2013 review of ten techniques in Psychological Science in the Public Interest (14(1), 4 to 58) gave a high utility rating to only two: practice testing and distributed practice. Rereading and highlighting were rated low. One caution: most of these studies used vocabulary and short passages, not codes or contracts, and the ExAC also asks you to apply knowledge. Treat flashcards as the recall layer under your practice questions.
A good card takes a few seconds to answer, and you know at once whether you got it right. Our rule of thumb has three parts.
Here is how a weak card becomes a set of strong ones. These are our own examples:
| Weak card | Why it fails | Better cards |
|---|---|---|
| "Changes in the Work" | A whole General Condition on one card; you can never be fully right or wrong. | "Change Order (CCDC 2, GC 6.2)" and "Change Directive (CCDC 2, GC 6.3)", plus a third card comparing the two. |
| "Which of these buildings falls under Part 9? A, B, C or D" | Four options let you recognise rather than recall. | "Part 9 scope limits" with the back: 3 storeys or less in building height, building area of 600 m² or less, listed major occupancies (NBC 2020, Division A, Article 1.3.3.3.). |
| A paragraph copied from CHOP | Rereading in disguise; nothing to retrieve. | One card per defined term or step, each with the CHOP reference. |
Keep the back in point form: a one-line answer, then two to five short bullets. If you need more, the front is too broad.
The exam rules decide where flashcards earn their time. The 2026 ExAC Preparation Guide (p.12) lists books, notes and reference documents as prohibited items. The one exception is Section 2, where paper copies of the NBC 2020, without provincial adaptations, and the NECB 2020 are permitted. The ExAC Framework Document (p.9) adds that digital versions of the codes are not allowed. So CHOP, CHING, CCDC 2 and the RAIC documents must be in your head for Sections 1, 3 and 4, and that is exactly the material spaced repetition suits.
Section 2 is different. Your copies may carry handwritten annotations, highlighting, circling, underlining and tabs made beforehand, but you may not add pages such as an index or a table, and you may not mark the books once you are in the room (Preparation Guide, p.12). The Framework Document gives Section 2 about 75 multiple-choice questions (p.5) in a three-hour session (p.10). You have the text, but not much time to find it.
| Material | Put it on a card | Leave it to the book or to practice |
|---|---|---|
| Sections 1, 3 and 4 (closed book) | Definitions, process steps, roles, contract terms, assembly principles, comparisons | Long worked examples; cost line items, since appendix booklets with reference tables are supplied for Sections 1, 2 and 3 (Framework Document, p.9) |
| Section 2 concepts | Defined terms, the three Divisions, Part 3 vs Part 9 scope, which Part or table answers which kind of question | Article text and clause numbers |
| Section 2 numbers | Only the handful you check so often that a lookup costs you time (our suggestion) | Most dimensions, ratings and table values; tab them and practise finding them |
| Short answers (Sections 1 and 3) | The two or three points a classic answer needs | Writing practice under time, on lined space |
Our 12-week plan puts it bluntly: tab the code; do not flashcard it. A Section 2 card should send you to the right page, not replace the page. "Where are the attribution tables?" is a good card. "Maximum travel distance in a sprinklered floor area" is better found in the book, unless you keep losing time on it. Our posts on Section 2 pacing and the Division B appendix notes cover the lookup side.
The study load this blog uses, from the 12-week plan, is 6 to 10 hours a week. Flashcards should take about 1.5 hours of that, in short daily sessions, with the rest on reading and timed questions. The six steps below are our suggested routine:
Pick the sections you are writing and count the weeks to the sitting, so you know how far apart reviews can be.
After each reading session, add that topic's cards to your rotation: write them (one concept, a recall cue on the front, the reference on the back) or switch that topic on in a ready-made deck.
Say or write the answer first, then check it, and sort each card into known or missed.
Spend 15 to 20 minutes, five days a week, starting with the cards you missed last time.
Check known cards again after about a week, then two weeks, and retire them only after several correct recalls on separate days.
Each week, compare missed questions with your deck and add or fix cards where the gap was a fact you did not know.
You do not need software to space reviews. Put each card in a box (or a pile, list or tag) and move it along as you answer it correctly. A miss sends it back to Box 1. The intervals are our own example, sized for an exam about 12 weeks away:
| Box | Cards in it | Review |
|---|---|---|
| Box 1 | New cards and any card you missed | Every study day |
| Box 2 | Correct once | Twice a week |
| Box 3 | Correct twice, on different days | Once a week |
| Box 4 | Correct three times | Every two weeks |
| Retired | Correct four times running | One pass in the final two weeks |
Shrink the gaps as the sitting gets closer: since the best gap depends on how long you need to remember, daily passes make sense in the last fortnight. The 12-week study plan shows where the minutes sit in a working week, and the free study plan builds a schedule around your dates.
The Examitect deck has 1,000+ flashcards across the four ExAC sections, built on the rules above: a recall cue on the front, a point-form answer on the back, and the source reference on each card. To be clear about what it does and does not do: the deck does not run a spaced-repetition algorithm or schedule reviews for you. It shuffles the cards you choose and remembers your marks, so the spacing is yours to set.
Here is how the box schedule maps onto the app:
| Routine step | In the Examitect deck |
|---|---|
| Sort known and missed | Mark each card Got it or Revisit after you flip it. A card holds one mark at a time. |
| Box 1 every day | Open Filters, choose Revisit under My marks, and run only those cards. |
| Space the known cards | Once a week, filter to Got it and run them; mark any miss Revisit. |
| Study by topic | Filter by topic or by concept type, such as definitions, thresholds or common traps. |
| Flag the hard ones | Bookmark a card, then filter to Bookmarked for a short focused set. |
| Mixed spot-check | Quick Mode serves a random sample of about 20% of the section, spread across topics. Filters do not apply in Quick Mode. |
The deck saves your place, and Restart keeps your Got it and Revisit marks. The app does not record when you last reviewed a card, so keep the dates in your calendar: for example, Revisit on weekdays and Got it on Sunday. If a card looks wrong, the Report button sends it to the support team. You can flip through sample cards from every section on the free flashcards page without signing up.
Flipping the card, reading the answer and thinking "yes, I knew that" is recognition. Roediger and Karpicke's restudy group felt more confident and remembered less. Commit to an answer before you flip, aloud or in two written words, and mark a vague answer as missed.
A card covering a whole topic takes a minute to answer and is never clearly right or wrong, so it drifts into the known pile half-learned. Split it until each back has one answer and a few bullets.
Running every card in a section each session, 250-plus in each section of the Examitect deck, wastes time on cards you already know and squeezes out the ones you do not. Move known cards to longer gaps. Do not overcorrect, though. Karpicke and Roediger found that dropping an item after one correct recall cut week-later recall from about 80% to around a third. Retire a card after several spaced successes, not one.
Memorising Section 2 clause numbers costs hours the open-book rules already save you. Card the concepts and the route to the answer; tab the rest.
The Framework Document says each item is mapped to a cognitive level on Bloom's taxonomy (p.8), and the exam uses five item types, from multiple choice to short written answers (p.6). Knowing a definition is the first step, not the last. Use timed questions to apply what the deck holds, and if you are rewriting a section, the retake plan shows how to aim both at your weakest topics.
Spaced repetition is reviewing the same material several times with gaps between the reviews, usually combined with recalling the answer before you check it. A 2006 review by Cepeda and colleagues of 317 experiments found spaced study beat the same study time in one block, and that the best gap grows as the test gets further away.
Flashcards work for the ExAC when they are used for recall and spaced over days, especially for the closed-book Sections 1, 3 and 4. They build the facts and terms that questions rely on, but they do not replace timed practice questions, which train you to apply that knowledge.
Our suggestion is about 1.5 hours a week: 15 to 20 minutes on five days, inside a 6 to 10 hour study week. Short daily sessions space the reviews naturally and leave most of the week for reading and practice questions.
Make Section 2 flashcards for concepts and navigation, not clause numbers. Paper copies of the NBC 2020 and NECB 2020 are permitted in Section 2, with annotations and tabs made beforehand, so cards should cover defined terms, Part 3 vs Part 9 scope and where to look, while the tabbed code holds the numbers.
The front of an ExAC flashcard should be a short recall cue, such as "Change Order vs Change Directive", rather than a full multiple-choice question. The back should hold one answer in point form plus the reference, such as CCDC 2, GC 6.2 and GC 6.3.
Stop reviewing a card regularly only after you have recalled it correctly several times on separate days, then give it one last pass before the exam. A 2008 study by Karpicke and Roediger found that dropping items after a single correct recall left students remembering about a third of them a week later, against about 80% when testing continued.
No, Examitect flashcards do not schedule reviews automatically. The deck shuffles the cards you select and saves Got it, Revisit and bookmark marks, so you apply spacing yourself by filtering to Revisit cards on most days and running Got it cards about once a week.
A week out is not too late, but the plan changes. Use short daily passes on your weakest topics, review missed cards the same day and again the next, and skip building new decks from scratch. Spacing helped at every retention interval in Cepeda's review, so even a few days of gaps beat one long session.