It seems that with older decks, cards that have many reviews, especially pre-FSRS, will have their difficulty will inevitably be 90%+, even if their apparent difficulty doesn’t seem to be as such. I just can’t seem to determine what difficult means at all about the card, as a significant amount of times I find my “easier” cards to have been more difficult than the ones deemed more difficulty.
Does FSRS 7 change the approach to difficulty at all?
There no such thing as “FSRS 7.” There are some ideas (well, one, at least) bubbling about, and if any of them come to fruition, they might eventually turn into another FSRS release, but nothing is actually planned yet. Calling it “FSRS 7” is quite premature.
Difficulty (D) is a measure of the relative difficulty of cards within a given preset, but it doesn’t necessarily map to your sense of what a “difficult” card is. It’s used to control the rate of growth of the intervals – some cards need to grow slower, some faster. D isn’t good or bad, even if it’s high or low. So if you are meeting your retention goals [Stats > Retention], D isn’t really something you need to worry about.
I haven’t heard any discussions about D needing a “fix” – so perhaps it would be more helpful for you to figure out what is going on in your own collection right now.
If you feel you’ve got a sufficient amount of review history and well-optimized parameters (re-optimized monthly) – perhaps you can show us an example of a Card Info where you think the difficulty would be higher or lower? It would also help to see your Stats > Card Difficulty – specifically for the cards in that Options preset.
Thanks very much for the reply. Given that it doesn’t necessarily map to difficulty as to how it is commonly understood in real life, I think calling it “difficulty” trips up a lot of new users who expect that fact and maybe it should be considered a different term. Maybe something like “card mobility”.
I thought I saw one of the main collaborators noting that difficulty doesn’t work well in its current state, so that what I was referencing. Cheers again for the help
I don’t think a rename is likely, given that it’s standard terminology used for the 3-component model of memory – ABC of FSRS · open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki Wiki · GitHub .
There will be a minor change (I removed one parameter that didn’t affect the metrics in the benchmark), so overall no, it won’t “fix” difficulty.
I just can’t seem to determine what difficult means at all about the card, as a significant amount of times I find my “easier” cards to have been more difficult than the ones deemed more difficulty.
It’s purely a function of grades (Again/Hard/Good/Easy), nothing else.