I am looking to use Anki for short-term test preparation. I want to have the intervals to be 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, and 1 day. I do not want these intervals to change next time based on which interval I select. I have searched in many places and have spent an hour fiddling with the software and it cannot do what I want as the intervals will change. I am thinking, however, that this may not be possible because I do not think I am using Anki the way it was intended to be used.
By this do you mean the values on the grading buttons the first time the card is shown? Or do you mean your learning steps?
What does that mean? Do you want the intervals to be as though the card were New every time you study it? That really takes the “spaced” part out of spaced repetition. Can you explain what your goal is – to make sure we don’t have an XY problem?
My apologies. Thank you for clarifying the issue. I want the intervals to be as though the card were new every time that I study it. However, if this is a poor study method, please let me know as I am open to critiques. The reason why I do not want to use the “spaced” part of spaced repetition is because I typically start reviewing for my exams only a week or two before the exam and usually have only about 75 cards. I usually study for an exam in one-hour intervals twice a day leading up to the exam. Thus, I do not want to have intervals much larger than one day out of fear that I will forget the information, and having intervals that are between one hour and less than one day is largely pointless to me. I hope this helps to clarify the issue and thank you for your assistance.
What you have just described there is cramming, or mass repetition – the opposite of spaced repetition. You can use Anki to do it, but you’ll spend/waste a lot more time studying.
If you understand the basic idea of spaced repetition – one of its purposes is to get the cards you don’t need to study (as often) out of your way, so that you can focus on the cards you do need to study. If you’re interested in that at all, make a plan to get your cards introduced quickly, and then you’ll have plenty of time to study the rest of the deck and do more focused reviews at the end. For that, you should follow the directions for enabling FSRS – Deck Options - Anki Manual .
If you’re still determined to stick with that method, Filtered decks are the way to do it (see the link above). Your filter could be as simple as is:new if that matches what you want to study (test that search in the Browse window first).
In the options for your Filtered deck, uncheck reschedule-based-on, and you can set whatever delays you want for each of the grading buttons. You can either use that 1d interval you mentioned, or just let the card “graduate” from the Filtered deck at that point. Whenever you start a study session, Rebuild the Filtered deck, and it will pull all your cards back together to start over.
It doesn’t matter what scheduling algorithm Anki is using, because none of the grades will be recorded and none of the cards will be scheduled for new due dates.