A common problem for law and med students with the v3 scheduler: Per branch counting of new cards/reviews (affecting deck limits)

[basiskarten]

The following is something I am asked about frequently. I describe why I think this issue is common and suggest a fix.

Typical use case:

Many law or med students use Anki to study for their exams and have to get through a huge number of new cards (>5000) before a certain date. Almost all of them calculate the daily number of new cards they need to learn every day in order to get through in time. They set this number as their new card limit and expect Anki to tell them when they achieved their daily goal, so they can rest content that they achieved another small step toward their big goal.

Since the latest version of Anki forces everyone to upgrade to the v3 scheduler many are frustrated because suddenly this doesn’t work anymore as expected. The new cards they study in one branch aren’t subtracted from their set limit, even if another branch shares the same deck options group.

Here is a video that illustrates what I am talking about. Most users expect to see the number 20 on all decks in this example.

I can understand the frustration of these users because from their perspective they are suddenly robbed of one of the few small wins that are critical toward establishing a regular learning routine.

The suggested solution and why it is not an option for these users:

When we discussed this previously you suggested:

@dae

if you’d like to impose a global limit on the number of reviews, you need to put all cards under a single top-level deck, and click on that deck, or keep an eye on its remaining count as you click on subdecks.

The first suggestion is not an option for law and med students since mixing cards of different topics in one deck would be much worse than having to check manually how many cards you studied today.

The second suggestion is of course possible but very cumbersome. It also means that something that was the standard before suddenly is not even an option anymore.

Proposal

I think the importance of small, direct feedback like: “Congratulations! You studied the desired amount of new cards today!” can hardly be overestimated, which is why I want all users to get it directly from Anki (instead of having to count manually):

If I contribute the code for this (or find somebody who does), would you be open to making the global counting of studied new cards/reviews a deck option at least?

I think many academic users would be very grateful for this – and that includes me since it would solve a common complaint that I can’t do anything about at the moment.

[dae]

The changes in v3 were motivated by the fact that many users got confused that their subdecks weren’t showing cards due to the limits set by the parent decks, and that increasing the limits of a child deck would have no effect when a parent was the limiting factor. But I can appreciate why some users would want to impose a global limit while still clicking on individual decks. I’ve logged this on Consider providing a way to have parent decks impose a limit on reviews · Issue #2818 · ankitects/anki · GitHub for further thought.

[glutanimate]

@dae thanks for taking this consideration. I was also a bit confused about this behavior in v3 initially. Would agree that the previous limit override behavior was quite helpful for defining daily goals for the long-term exam prep use case.

[Levitator]

I appreciate this idea as a medical doctor… Thanks for describing the issue @basiskarten

Special thanks to @Rumo for implementing the idea…!