Hey guys,
I just wanted to draw your attention to the thought that in some use cases, a desired retention <70% could prove useful. I used Anki for example for learning (German) law and as law exams in Germany aren’t pure knowledge tests but rather complex tests, I’m quite sure that some law students would opt for a desired retention of around 60% if that was possible (and in case it saved them even more time), also as a consequence of the following 2 additional effects:
Obviously, desired retention concerns only due cards; a desired retention of “60%” means consequently that the retention of all cards at a given moment (due + not due) is significantly higher (especially in German law, as many students use to learn for the final exams 12-18 months).
Despite the Minimum Information Principle, German law knowledge is not as easy to split as the knowledge in Wozniak’s Red-Sea-example => If one card consists of 4 chunks, e.g. 4 conditions of a law principle, and I forgot 2, this card will be counted as 100% forgotten although I recalled 50% of it correctly.
If I take these effects into account, the “60%” desired retention might be actually 70% (taken the not due cards into account) and might in fact even rather be 75-80% if I counted in the partly recalled knowledge chunks. (These figures are only extremely rough presumptions, but I hope you get what I mean).
Obviously, most Anki users aren’t German law students (although it reached quite a solid user base of I guess several thousand users). But I guess its conditions might apply to other use cases, too (i.e. longer learning periods and multi-chunk cards).
=> Would it be possible to extend the possible desired retention range down to, let’s say, 60%?
One issue I have with lower retentions is that it's psychologically more difficult for me to get cards wrong. How do you deal with that?
How do you use it for studying law? I'm just trying it but a card for each article doesn't work for me, since often I can't remember the context.
Guess this depends heavily on the type of law exam you're preparing for, different countries have very different approaches in this regard. For German speaking students, I'd start having a look at Basiskarten's website, I found that quite instructive
Isn’t the issue with retention <70% that in a long term it doesn’t save time because you actually learn too few cards effectively to lower your daily review count?
About the second point about MIP,
What you said is bullshit,
If 1 note has 1 card and you test yourself in 4 ways with one card then this should not be 1 card at all, it should be 1 note with 4 cards. One for each thing you want to test yourself.
The example that you gave to show when MIP is not good is the perfect example of when MIP is good.
edit: since you based all of your post on this, I do not feel there is nothing more I could add.
Edit2: I agree that there are good use cases for desire retention lower than 70%, but I totally disagree with your thought process.
Well, I disagree. In the beginning, I was a MIP hardliner, too. And in other areas like languages it's a different kind of story. Don't know if you are into law, but if I want to create a card on the proportionality principle which has 4 conditions in a strict order and each condition consists out of 1 word, it just makes no sense to split it into 4 cards, trust me. Btw what is about effect 1?
Long story short: I have a background in law.
Can you give a concrete example? Like, the pint of a card.
erm i'm saying never. anything below your Compute Minimum Recommended Retention is inefficient
It's not possible to calcu`late the MRR anymore though, is it?
works just fine on my anki
Haven't you maybe updated it in a while? 😅 Afaik they removed in at some point
update you say? I don't think ive ever done that lol