Is there something I can do to determine the rate at which flashcards come up once they've been 'learnt' or reached a certain score? I've been using Frequency Adjust and limiting the number of new cards that are added to my pile (great feature!). However, the learnt cards and even those I have been studying for many months still seem to be coming up as frequently as the new ones and some now have scores in the hundreds of thousands. I thought they would automatically reduce in frequency according to their score. Is there something else I need to do to? I think I tried this with the Repetition Spaced option and had the same problem.
Flashcard flashcard go away...
- Thread starter Li Fei
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Well one thing you could do would be to enable the "limit unlearned" option; that'll keep learned cards from taking up more than a set portion of your flashcard session. It's available in the Cards tab of Advanced Settings.
I'm not sure why the old cards would be coming up so frequently, though - if you go into Card Info for a card that you feel like you've just studied, does its "last reviewed" time actually indicate that it was shown recently? (it could be that you're just so familiar with the words that you feel like you've seen them recently, though it could certainly also be a bug
)
I'm not sure why the old cards would be coming up so frequently, though - if you go into Card Info for a card that you feel like you've just studied, does its "last reviewed" time actually indicate that it was shown recently? (it could be that you're just so familiar with the words that you feel like you've seen them recently, though it could certainly also be a bug
)
One other possibility - how many cards are included in your session by default, i.e., how many are covered by your selected categories / card filters if you set card selection to Random and # of cards (in Test Setup) to All? If there are too few, those old cards might keep coming up simply because there are no other cards left to show you.
I've been using the flashcards every day for the last week or so to try and nail down exactly what the problem is but without much luck. Today, for instance, with all my flashcards (some 1500 or so) selected and with Pleco set to Frequency Adjust, the first card to come up had a score of two hundred and something thousand. It had been reviewed 13 times, ALWAYS with the correct answer. I hadn't reviewed it before THIS week for several months, but that shouldn't affect how likely it is to come up should it (as opposed to with Repetition Spaced where there's a fixed schedule)? Once a card reaches a certain score, it stays there whether or not you review it, I assume. The only way to lower it is by giving a wrong answer (or by resetting or lowering the score manually). Am I right about this?
As far as I know Pleco automatically reduces the likelihood of a card coming up based on its score (which increases with each correct answer). It just seems, though, that this isn't happening, as cards with very high scores and which have long since been 'learnt' (for me that means correct four times in a row) are still coming up. I've set the number of unlearnt cards to 10 but that, I assume, won't affect the rate at which learnt cards lessen in frequency.
Is there a detailed explanation of the way scores work and how they influence automatic card selection on the Pleco site somewhere?
As far as I know Pleco automatically reduces the likelihood of a card coming up based on its score (which increases with each correct answer). It just seems, though, that this isn't happening, as cards with very high scores and which have long since been 'learnt' (for me that means correct four times in a row) are still coming up. I've set the number of unlearnt cards to 10 but that, I assume, won't affect the rate at which learnt cards lessen in frequency.
Is there a detailed explanation of the way scores work and how they influence automatic card selection on the Pleco site somewhere?
The algorithm for frequency-adjusted tests is actually extremely simple: Pleco gives each card a "weight" which is 1 / its score, puts all of the cards in a big stack, randomly picks a number between 0 and (sum total of all of the weights), goes down through the stack to find the card corresponding to that number (i.e., the card for which the sum of the weights of all of the cards above it is equal to that random number), and shows you that card. So the frequency with which a card comes up is inversely proportional to its score; a card with a score of 200 should show up half as often as a card with a score of 100. So that card had a very low likelihood of coming up, which is probably why it hadn't come up in a few months, but the odds of it coming up in any particular session were still > 0 and in this case the random number draw just happened to point to that card. If you look at the "Statistics" screen you can see how many cards are in that sort of very high score range; even if each individual high-score card is not very likely to come up, if you have enough cards with high scores, the odds that some high-score card will come up in a session are still pretty high.
One other thing: it's a bit confusing, but if you set "number of cards" to "All," the frequency-adjusted algorithm is actually turned off, and cards are shown entirely randomly. This is because if you want to see all of the cards that are available, by definition that means that every card should show up once, so showing some cards more often / less often becomes irrelevant. When we disabled that "All" option for frequency-adjusted during the 2.0 beta test, it made a lot of people unhappy, so we put it back in for that reason. Based on some recent discussions, though, we may stick to our guns and get rid of "All" in Frequency-adjusted again in 2.0.8, and there's a pretty good chance we'll get rid of Frequency-adjusted altogether in the iPhone version.
A better scoring system for you than Frequency-adjusted might be "Random" with the "unlearned card ratio" option enabled / set to something very high (say 70 or 80 percent) - that's a bit more crude than Frequency-adjusted, but it should get those old cards to show up even less often than they do now.
Re your other questions, yes, the only way to lower the score is to give a wrong answer or reset / lower it manually.
One other thing: it's a bit confusing, but if you set "number of cards" to "All," the frequency-adjusted algorithm is actually turned off, and cards are shown entirely randomly. This is because if you want to see all of the cards that are available, by definition that means that every card should show up once, so showing some cards more often / less often becomes irrelevant. When we disabled that "All" option for frequency-adjusted during the 2.0 beta test, it made a lot of people unhappy, so we put it back in for that reason. Based on some recent discussions, though, we may stick to our guns and get rid of "All" in Frequency-adjusted again in 2.0.8, and there's a pretty good chance we'll get rid of Frequency-adjusted altogether in the iPhone version.
A better scoring system for you than Frequency-adjusted might be "Random" with the "unlearned card ratio" option enabled / set to something very high (say 70 or 80 percent) - that's a bit more crude than Frequency-adjusted, but it should get those old cards to show up even less often than they do now.
Re your other questions, yes, the only way to lower the score is to give a wrong answer or reset / lower it manually.
OK. The "number of cards" setting isn't deciding how many flashcards are eligible to come up in the session, it's just deciding how long the session runs for; you might actually want to try "Endless" there, that test is frequency-adjusted and will go on for as long as you like.