I’m having a hard time understanding the “Reviews” options page as I recently started to adjust the “Interval modifier” percentage. Here is my observations and thoughts so far:
In one of my decks I’m using an “Interval modifier” of 65% to shorten the review intervals. The “Easy bonus” is set to 130%. But I’ve observed quite a few cards that showed me the exact same time interval in all 3 categories (Hard, Good and Easy), mainly above the 1-month mark (I remember seeing cards with all three options set to 1.1 months, all three options set to 1.3 months and so on). Other cards showed the same interval for two out of the three options and a different interval for the third one.
(Reviews were done on Anki for iOS 2.0.63 (20063.6). using the default scheduler.)
-> I consider this a bug because my understanding is that we have a default interval which is used for Good (in my case it will be 65% of the double of the previous interval for that card), and from this default interval we derive the Easy and Hard intervals. Therefore Easy should always be Good * 1.3 with my settings, not identical to Good. Also, no matter the setting, Hard should always be below Good, not equal to Good.
I wanted to counteract this issue by adjusting the Hard interval with the beta scheduler (I looked at it in the Desktop application), but when I opened the settings page I noticed that the default setting was 120%. (The documentation confirms this default value and my understanding: “eg with a default 120%, a card with a 10 day interval will be given 12 days”.) But we are talking about the Hard interval here, which is supposed to be shorter than the Good interval? How can it be 120%? I had expected to see something like 80% or 70% here. Does this mean once the beta scheduler is enabled, I need to go through all of my decks’ options and adjust the Hard interval because the default setting turns the Hard button into another Easy button?
Thank you very much, this tutorial is really insightful!
And no, I did not mess up my deck options, it’s actually the way Anki works (and I can’t say that’s really intuitive):
If I have these settings on a card: Previous interval: 30 days Hard Interval: 120% Interval modifier: 65% Ease: 130% Easy bonus: 130%
then I get those times for the three options: Hard: 30 * 1.2 * 0.65 = 23.4 days -> auto-increased to 31 days Good: 30 * 1.3 * 0.65 = 25.35 days -> auto-increased to 31 days Easy: 30 * 1.3 * 1.3 * 0.65 = 32.95 days
and those are probably all represented as 1.1 months due to rounding.
So the real killer here (that prevents me from seeing a healthy spread in these options) is the fact that the new interval can never be shorter than the previous one if I use one of these three options. If I want to shorten the interval, I actually need to fail the card.
Also, it taught me that for my very conservative settings of 130% Easy bonus and initial Ease, it does not make any sense at all to have an Interval Modifier of 65% because this flooring of the calculation will always give the same results for Interval Modifiers of 77% or lower… Which then leads to the understanding that I will probably not be able to get to a retention of 90% on mature cards (according to the calculation in the docs) because I cannot proceed slowly enough with Anki
well, having an interval of 25 n good button when your previous interval was 30 days is actually due to a messed up deck options.
i remember myself setting interval modifier on 50% or even lower thinking it would help me remember better. it did not
try to keep interval modifier if not 100%, above 90%
it just increases the cards you have to review (you won’t feel it at firs tho).
and don’t be afraid of forgetting some cards, it’s normal to fail some cards. you should not expect yourself to remember everything when you make flashcards.
Oh, sorry, I never claimed that was the case, I just said I saw the same new interval on several buttons. I usually don’t know my previous interval during reviews, so I would not be able to tell.
I just followed the documentation which says a retention rate of 90% on mature cards is desirable.
Full disclosure: I am a happy Anki user since almost 3 years, and I never changed the interval modifier until recently, because I stumbled upon this section in the documentation and I wanted to give it a try. Also, I only did that on a deck that contains very important information that I really want to remember, because like you said, usually it’s ok to forget some things, but for this deck I want to get better than that, and I noticed that for some cards the intervals were getting quite a bit large, so I wanted to slow down the process and thought it would be nice to follow the instructions given in the docs. ¯\__(ツ)_/¯
which says a retention rate of 90% on mature cards is desirable.