The real answer to this is to regularly create good cards during your semester. This drastically reduces the amount of cards you need to create a week before yo

The real answer to this is to regularly create good cards during your semester. This drastically reduces the amount of cards you need to create a week before your exam which in turn reduces the amount of cramming you have to do. Now don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly well aware that the knowledge required for exams isn't representative of the knowledge required to be well versed in a topic outside of exams, and Anki can still help you learn stuff that you specifically want to remember for exams, but you can remove those cards afterwards. You don't actually need (and probably don't want) to remember much of the stuff that instructors want you to remember for exams. So after the exam you just keep reviewing as normal, but radically delete/suspend cards that were exam specific. This way you start learning a lot of the things that you actually want to remember longterm during the semester, while also avoiding a lot of clutter from exam specific cards.