[chucksmash]

What you say about the act of making the cards themselves rings true to me.

When I was preparing for the GRE in 2010 I first wrote down all the words and definitions from both the Princeton Review and Kaplan GRE vocab books on a legal pad. That didn't work as well as I'd hoped for quizzing (it's a pain to try not to read 90% of the page) so I wrote a really basic data entry script in Python that I used to input the words/defs and then a second one that would generate random questions based off of them (definition + 4 words as MC).

By the time I was done with typing them all in and debugging my little quiz script, I'd say I already had active recall on >90% of them. Having that working quizzing tool at the end to practice recognition was just icing on the cake - creating it in the first place was more useful to me.