True Retention is a lot lower than Desired Retention

Anki FSRS
1

I switched to FSRS several months ago and after a few months I changed my decks desired retentions to lower than defaults, this one had 85% retention and the other ones had 80%. After a while I noticed that i am probably not getting 85% true retention and after checking I noticed it was significantly lower. After that I tried turning on rescheduling after change and then turning on ignoring cards before around the time I lowered my desired retention but it did not help. The other decks have true retentions closer to their desired ones, and this one is not sharing a preset with any other deck. I don’t know if it matters but it is a kanji deck and I almost exclusively use again and good buttons. I was planning on just turning desired retention higher so my true retention reaches the point I want but I wanted to ask you first. I don’t know what is actually important so I am posting everything below.

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Log loss: 0.5615, RMSE(bins): 7.04%.

0.1018, 0.4829, 1.4252, 3.5830, 7.5902, 0.3575, 1.7963, 0.0102, 1.0915, 0.3441, 0.5779, 1.9666, 0.0930, 0.2865, 2.3242, 0.2315, 2.9608, 0.1483, 0.6667

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2

Which version of Anki did you use? I recommend updating to Anki 25.07 with FSRS-6. It’s more accurate than previous version.

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My version was Anki 25.2 now i updated it to 25.7. After resetting the ignore the reviews before … option I optimized and rescheduled again and i got a about 200 extra reviews and my daily load increased to 95 from 84 so I assume it adapted better. Also i got left the health check on and it said it adapted well but i really don’t know what that means. Also I heard that usually it is preferable to reschedule when changing the settings but anki warns against it?

1 Like
4

Pros:

  • You will enjoy the effect of changes immediately.

Cons:

  • It usually introduce a backlog that you have to catch up.
  • It generates rescheduling review logs which will increase your collection size.
2 Likes
5

Hello, I had the same problem, that my true retention has been lower than my desired retention. So, I simply started to increase the desired retention:

  1. Increase the desired retention by 1 % and reschedule cards on change.
  2. Revise the backlog. Study for one or two weeks to see your current true retention.
  3. Repeat points one and two until you are satisfied with the true retention.

I have aimed to 90 %. My actual desired retention setting is 94 % while my true retention is about 90 %. This state is stable and it has been working for several months. It is an interesting thing my workload didn’t significantly increased and now, after some time, the workload is more or less the same as before the changes.

You can see my original post here: Trying to reach retention 90 %

1 Like