Why can I not see the effect of different grades during memorizing new items, and during the final drill? Are grades used there, and how?
At memorizing and at final drill, the interpretation of grades is limited to Pass (4 or more) and Fail (less than 4). None of the optimization parameters are affected. Here are the reasons: – at memorizing new items, grades cannot be used to determine item difficulty, because the program has no way of knowing if a good grade resulted from easiness of the item or from the fact that the user has just input the given item to the database. Consequently, grades cannot affect optimization, and are only used to detect items that should be scheduled for final drill. – Final drill is not used for optimization either. This is because of the fact that final drill relies on short-term memory, and is substantially more sensitive to inter-item interference as well as more dependent on the number of other items separating repetitions of the item in question. Final drill is used solely for the purpose of fixing the forgotten information in the user’s brain. Grades are used only to eliminate from the f
