First of all, let me preface by saying I’m still kind of new to anki but I really like it so far although I’m really not using anki as it was intended to be used. I’m a grad student and I have block exams pretty much every 1-2 weeks in more than one course. We often don’t get the last bit of material to study until 2-3 days before the date of the exam, meaning if I used anki properly I would only get to learn the new material and never get to review it.
Because of this, I have tinkered with my settings a fair bit, and I found a system/interval that works for me given the amount of time I actually have to learn and review the material but I notice sometimes, anki doesn’t follow it how i want and I’m not sure if I changed something or if anki normally does this and if so, if I can change it.
Ultimately I want my cards to appear with the following options:
While learning, I want my intervals set to be 20 minutes, 1 hour, 8 hours, and 1 day.
If I pick hard I want it to bring it back in 20 minutes repeatedly until I pick good.
If I pick good, I want it to bring it back in 1 hour, then 8 hours then 8 hours again if good is picked consecutively.
If I pick easy, I want it to bring it back in 1 day, then every day afterwards.
Like I said, I typically only have 3-4 days to study all of my cards for an exam (and I usually have 300-400 cards). Escentially the 8 hours so I can do the set in the morning of day one, and redo the trickier ones that same night. (8 hours so that I can take 2 hours going through them and review them in about 12 hours time). Then, the next morning I want to basically to review all of them again, the ones that got sent to 8 hours twice, and the ones that got sent to 1 day. Then I’d like to be able to to pick 8 hours again if they are still hard so I can do them that night again, or 1 day if good, and if it’s easy probably 2 days, at that point it probably will not get reviewed again before the exam.
I know this is not the way anki was designed, but the fact of the matter is I pretty consistently have 1 exam a week, I spend a solid chunk of time making cards, by the time I get all the material and make the cards there is simply not weeks to study and most of my courses do not have cumulative exams or exams that build on previous concepts, it’s very “chunky”.
Any way, I’ve currently fudged with a bunch of settings so today when i was studying, I was getting the 20m, 1h, 8h, 1day options I wanted and all was going well, I was a good way through the deck, then all of a sudden for literally no reason my 8hr option disappeared and both easy and good became 1 day so now I only have 20 min, 1hr, 1day and 1day. I thought maybe just because 8hours from now would be the next day, but last time it did this a couple weeks ago, the cards never came back until 1 day after the 1 day. For example, I was studying at 11pm saturday and wanted to pick 8 hours so the hard ones came back sunday around 9am, (with the option to pick hard and review again around 8pm sunday) but my 8 hour button became 1 day then they didn’t come back until 11pm the next day at which point I was in bed because my exam was 7am on monday. The settings I have were literally working perfectly until it does this switch to changing my button from 8 hours to 1 day.
If anyone can please suggest what I can change to stop this from happening it would be greatly appreciated- I’d basically just like to review harder things every 8 hours for 3 days and easy things less.
I’ll list the current settings I have incase that helps -
Learning steps: 20m 1h 8h 1d
Graduating interval: 1
Easy: 1
Maximum Interval: 2
Starting Ease: I can’t change, it’s 1.31 idk why.
Easy Bonus: 1
Interval Modifier: 0.5
Hard Interval: 0.5
New Interval: 0
I had one exam thursday, friday, monday and my last one on wednesday so not a huge deal to figure this out asap with only one exam left, but I would LOVE to have it worked out before next semester so I can get a better start and maybe stay on top of making the cards 
Any help much appreciated!