I just realised i am misusing easy as good for long period of time.
I have a controller to flip and answer the card.
However, the button i normally thought is good, i just realise that it is easy.
What should i do to reverse this damage?
please help.
How long is a “long period of time”? Days, weeks, since you started using Anki?
How does your Stats > Answer Buttons graph look?
This looks very odd.
It doesn’t show the overuse of the “Easy” button you are describing. If anything, it seems like you mostly overused the “Hard” button, which lead to only a negligible amount of cards ever graduating.
Just in case, can you share your “learning steps” setting? Or maybe you are aware of any other reason your cards might be stuck in the learning phase?
The auto fix for hard misuse won’t be of much help here. As far as I know, it focuses on the long-term scheduling, while your cards never grew enough to even initialize their long-term states.
I’m not sure though, what would constitute a fix in such a case at all? Do you mean the “Hard” button in the review history to be reinterpreted as “Good” and the card states to be adjusted accordingly?
In any case, spaced repetition is self-correcting by its nature, and only a few extreme cases can ruin it to the degree where it won’t just stabilize itself over time by simply continuing the studies. The cards that you know better then indicated by their interval in the database, for example, should quickly grow to their right spot after you correct the rating behavior. In your case, however, it’s not that evident whether you have learned the cards you’be been studying at all, since the fraction of the “Again” in the stats is extremely high as well. So if you really did not memorize them at this point, no adjustments to Anki history will change that fact. You will have to start learning them properly from the beginning either way.
In the past, I abused the “Hard” button to study for my term exams because I didn’t want those cards committed to my long-term memory. Now that I am preparing for my medical licensing exam, I need to use Anki properly to build long-term retention like everyone else does.
I researched how to reverse the damage to the algorithm and decided to reset my FSRS settings a month ago. Unfortunately, from the time of that reset up until yesterday, I ran into the issue mentioned above: I was mistakenly using the “Easy” button when I should have been hitting “Good.”
Please let me know if I am being clear enough, thank you for your reply anyways.
Also, given that I will take the exam one month later, what should I do to maximise my result? Given my abovementioned problem.
currently, my thought is
1. reset fsrs parameter agaim
Just to be clear, if you didn’t optimize the parameters before that, they wouldn’t be affected by the button misuse. Any potential damage would be to the histories of individual cards, not the global algorithm.
If the damage you are referring here is about overusing the ‘Hard’ button – it seems to be easily negated by resetting all the cards currently in their learning state. With only a single learning step you’ll lose absolutely nothing if you simply start learning them from scratch.
Does that mean that you’ve been misusing it for only a month instead of a year as was originally implied?
It’s not clear from the screenshot because the numbers are too small, but what are your actual counters for the ratings of Young cards in the stats? They are displayed if you hover your mouse over each column.
The concept of spaced repetition goes somewhat against cramming in general and I, consequently, never use Anki in this way, so I won’t be of much help here. But you might want to start with familiarizing yourself with filtered decks, and actively look for things other people wrote about cramming and Anki.
I can’t say if your problem affects any general recommendations, since (1) I’m still not clear whether we are talking about one issue or two (misusing easy and overusing hard) and (2) it is not evident whether the first one bears any significance at all
For the easy button: I misued the easy button for a year, but it is on another decks which is irrelevant now.
For my current decks on my upcoming exam, the misuse easy issue has only occurred one month before, sincer they are newly made.
the main concern I want to address here is, how can I minimise the damage for the past one month misuse. As you said that, the hard misuse problem in the past can be fixed relatively easy by reseting the card. But I wonder if my current approach is correct
reset fsrs parameter
reset all card that I am currently focusing on
redo all the card
My main concern is, does reseting fsrs parameter and cards history really eliminate the misuse problem in the past? I just want to start everything again.
When I see 44% again, it’s a signal that something’s wrong; it should be 10% at most. Why is your time set to 10 minutes? Perhaps it was assumed that the student is a very good student, not someone who just clicks “Good” in 10 seconds and thinks they’ve memorized it. And they wrote here that FSRS doesn’t work during the learning phase; it’s more for repetition, once the map statistics have accumulated. If one repetition were enough for any knowledge, everyone would get top marks, but memory doesn’t work that way. It requires many repetitions during the lesson. Even when the teacher says a new definition, they repeat it as close as possible, then repeat it again, all to ensure it’s audible, and the students will automatically remember it. All this happens over the course of an hour, so new concepts are introduced many times, not just once. I like the advice from a Greek teacher who recommended reciting three facts until you memorize them and then moving on, although I’d also accept 5, 7, or 10. If FSRS wasn’t set at 1 minute or 10 minutes, then if you forgot something, it was given very close, somewhere around 6 cards (if you studied each for 10 seconds), so you still had time to remember it both in terms of time and the amount of new information. But if you have 10 minutes, and 50 new cards are pouring into you during that time, the knowledge you were supposed to remember disappears again. How do you choose the right time? Simply check with a filtered deck after 1-2 hours to see how much you know from the new cards you studied today. If you’ve already forgotten 20% today, don’t be surprised if you’ve forgotten 40% tomorrow. Choose your time based on the difficulty of your cards and how much time you need to study them. The best solution, which many people use, is to block all cards at the beginning of the study, then select 10-20 cards and study them for a certain period of time, say an hour… You study the material (you can just preview it), not the definition itself, although that’s possible, but perhaps the references to the card. After that, you can say for sure that you’ve memorized the card. Then you take your anks and go through it, and if you click “Good,” you’re certain you’ve memorized it. On other days, there will simply be repeats, and FSRS will handle them and predict many subsequent answers. Meanwhile, FSRS doesn’t know how difficult the card itself is, nor how difficult the card is for you.
Thank you for your detailed reply. But I just dont think this is feasible in any medical school exam…
I just want to loop them as many time as possible so for the actual exam I can maximise my outcome. I completely understand your approach, it is the most optimal way indeed. But for the hard facts like 100 pages of phamacology, hitting again is my only option to memorise them in my own flavour…
Again, thank you for your reply, appreciate your effort. It is very nice of you to reply in such a detailed manner.
I didn’t study medicine. However, Anki flashcards should be as simple as possible, allowing you to answer in 2-10 seconds and move on to the next one. Perhaps I misunderstood the 100-page requirement, sorry. But even cramming one page into a flashcard wouldn’t be accurate. The maximum I’d fit into a single paragraph of text—that’s the single unit of book information that conveys meaning. If it’s possible to condense it into a sentence, so much the better. But sometimes you have graphic charts that are absolutely full of facts. I’m a proponent of the idea that it’s perfectly acceptable to learn up to 10-15 terms on a single chart, and if there are more, then simply break the chart into sections and learn them individually. However, when there are a lot of facts, Anki doesn’t know which part is giving you trouble, and extra time will be wasted reviewing what you already know (this doesn’t apply to cloze flashcards, of course).
I’d advise you to ask your teachers or students who’ve already passed the exam what strategies they used for studying large amounts of information and what helped them.
I suggested that you missed the number of repetitions during your study, and you confirmed that you’d like to increase it. Well, that’s what a filtered deck does, but I again said that you need to limit the number of new cards introduced per hour. Because if you make a filtered deck of 100 cards and keep going through everything and clicking “Good,” you’ll likely fool yourself again and won’t remember anything. Just try to identify several repetitions during your study, not just 10 minutes. Open 10-20 cards for study, study them for, say, 40 minutes (1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes), rest for 20 minutes, and then try to quickly skim through these cards before choosing the next 10-20 for the next hour. Once four hours have passed and you’ve studied 40-80 cards, you can try repeating everything you studied today with a filtered deck. While I’m not against a large number of cards, Anki still recommends minimizing repetitions. Each person must determine for themselves both the difficulty of the card and the difficulty of their memory in remembering this information. FSRS can only do this through multiple answers to the card, and you don’t have time to wait and try the strategy of one answer a day and hope it sticks. With a 44% rate of pressing the “again” button, it’s worth considering improving your memorization.
Good luck on the exam!
And maybe someone studying medicine will respond and share what really helped them.
If your goal is to simply start over, then yes, resetting the cards and fsrs parameters does bring you back to square one. If you want to go even further, you can export your cards with “scheduling information” unchecked, delete their current versions in your collection, then import them back from the exported file. This will completely erase the previous review history for the cards in addition to their current states.
Each individual learns differently, this goes without saying, but it is equally as important to understand general study methods and the reasoning behind them to meaningfully choose between following or not following them. Otherwise it can easily lead to counterproductive learning habits disguised as personal preferences.
If you are worrying that FSRS won’t show you cards enough times to remember them – you should not. It is designed around the sole idea of showing each card as many times and as often as needed for you to remember it with the reliability that you set yourself (the amount of repetitions can be easily increased at any point by setting the desired retention > 90%, just make sure not to set it to a level so high you won’t be able to keep up with all the reviews it will require). For FSRS to start taking effect you need to phase your cards out of learning, however. I don’t think it is reasonable to conclude that this won’t work for you before you even tried, sticking instead to the methods the app wasn’t designed for in the first place. Keeping all flashcards in a single constant loop has barely any benefit over simply rereading a pdf document over and over again.
He’s set to 10 minutes and that’s it. This means that if he clicks “good,” the card will be used for the FSRS algorithm the next day. But why didn’t he set it to 1 minute and 10 minutes as it should be?
Let me explain the error here. There’s a concept called working memory, or the memory we can retain. It can hold approximately 5-7 objects, even if they’re repeated over and over again. Just because someone says a 5-word sentence doesn’t mean they’ve learned it. It’s most likely just in their working memory. Another check is needed, say in about 5 or 10 minutes, like in Anki. But if a person consistently forgets after 5-10 minutes, then the problem is with memorization, and the time needs to be reduced further. I suggest repeating 6 new cards. If we spend 10 seconds on a card, we can even set the time to 1 minute. For simpler cards, which only take 5 seconds, I set the repeat after 30 seconds, then 3 minutes, 10 minutes, and if repeating before and after sleep, you can add more time. Then people don’t understand how to memorize a word correctly. Don’t just repeat it once and press “good.” No, you have to pronounce the word, pause for the same amount of time as when you pronounce it (this is to allow the neuron’s excitation potential to decrease), pronounce the words again, which reactivates the neuron, and then repeat. So there should be at least three repetitions. This applies to new words; you don’t need to do this for familiar ones. But for new ones, you’ll have to pave the way and build connections, both before bed (the brain is tasked with determining what’s important) and after sleep (checking what we remember and signaling the brain again that this is important).
This isn’t a task for Anki or the FSRS algorithm, so maybe that’s why it’s not in the help. This is simply my experience and my own training and an analysis of several scientific books on how neurons work at the electrical and chemical levels, and how they simply need to grow. If you review 10 new words once a day and review 100 other different entertainment pieces of information many times a day, especially before bed, how is your brain supposed to understand that it urgently needs to build connections for those 10, and not for what you reviewed before bed, many, many times? This is common logic, but where are such words described?
That’s if the forgetting is the actual reason. My impression is that the learning cards were intentionally kept from graduating by not grading them higher than “Hard” regardless of whether they were successfully recalled or not in order to get additional reviews. I think you elaborated on the aspects of short-term learning enough, so I wasn’t commenting on that and focused on a separate point: that artificially holding the cards back for the stated purpose doesn’t make much sense – the amount of reviews will be automatically increased over time anyway if the initial repetition frequency is not enough to keep a card in the long-term memory.
I think you misunderstand me. I absolutely trust fsrs, especially after I understand how the algorithm or anki actually works after years of misuse.
Indeed, everything I do now is to make sure my algorithm is not affected by my past mistakes.
What i mean is in medical school, there is no way for me to use the study method kaiu mentioned above(which is learning the cards in detail), as the coverage is too much that you cant understand everything thoroughly. I use anki to mainly memorise facts, not learning.
Overall I do trust the algorithm and Im doing everything to reverse the damage. I just reset most of the cards that are wrongly graded as easy and am working on to study them all over again. My approach is after i finished the cards, then ill reset fsrs parameters to make sure the they are not affected.
I appreciate your research on all of this. And it for sure is the best case scenario that if i have long period of time to study.
But unfortunately the things that i need to memorise is too much and i have too few time. I just want to memorsie as much as possible for solely exam purpose. It is not for long term memory.
