AnKing low retention?

📖 AnkiHub Decks
1

I’m doing new cards in sketchy microbio and it seems that I am forgetting a lot. Any ideas besides to increase DR? I’m at DR 90%.

image
image1082×750 78 KB

2

Hello,

I would be happy to help. :slight_smile:

The only options, really, are to increase retention (and to make sure that you are optimizing FSRS occasionally)

Aside from that, for better or worse there aren’t any other ways to change your retention. In most cases, if you’re forgetting a lot the algorithm will adjust over time and it will eventually tune itself to your habits

Please let me know if that answers your question, and if there’s anything else I can help with. :slight_smile:

3

I’m having issues with sketchy microbiology only, so perhaps I am doing something wrong. I have good, even very good retention in Pathoma so far, and costanzo as well. I fear that I have too many reviews as it is to increase retention.

4

Yeah, if you increase retention it will necessarily balloon your reviews

The issue with FSRS is that it can’t ‘tell’ that you’re studying multiple subjects, and so it draws from the totality of your reviews. If you increase the retention it will try to compensate, but this will also necessarily come at the expense of increase review burden (that trade-off is fairly inherent; there isn’t a way around that unfortunately)

If one subject is harder for you than another, it makes sense that your performance may vary amongst them. This is pretty normal and to be expected. In theory you could move those cards to a different deck and a different preset, though I can’t guarantee that this would work (and would likely take additional time)

5

Yes, at the moment, I have separated pathoma and sketchy microbiology, and like you predicted, it increased the reviews of sketchy microbiology when I reoptimized with new parameters, but it decreased the amount of reviews in pathoma. In pathoma, my average retention is 88% young.

Perhaps I’m doing the videos wrong, do I need to take notes when I do them? Would that help me to solidify?

6

How are you going about doing the Sketchy videos?

  1. How many do you watch per day/per session?
  2. Do you do the Sketchy cards right after the video or days after?
  3. After you do the card for the first time, do you open the sketchy field and take a mental snapshot of the image for each card?
  4. If you said yes to number 3, in your subsequent reviews, do you do the same thing over and over to help create that mental image?

Especially with Sketchy, a huge plus to using the AnKing deck alongside Sketchy is the ability to see the sketchy over and over and over. So everytime you do a card that says for example, Listeria can be treated with ampicillin, click on teh Sketchy field, and stare at the image and bake that in your head everytime you do the card. Make a concious effort to retain this image because one day it will be the reason you get the question right.

Even if this makes you take longer per card, its more useful because once you do a Sketchy video, that video will serve you for the next 3-4 years if you put in effort at the start to mentally picture each card with its associated image. Also, make sure to take your time when answering the questions. Also your retention is not necessarily poor at all, anything above 80% is good, I would be worried if it was something like 50-60%, but yours is okay.

Also, microbiology is a very memorization heavy topic, its normal to forget more in micro compared to pathoma for example. Because there’s alot of things that make no sense, like which one is catalase positive, which one has urease, which one factultative etc. So this is normal, at the start it was difficult for me to get micro cards wrong but I spent alot of time focusing on looking at the sketchy image each time i did the card, and especially if i got the card wrong.

I hope this helps!!

1 Like
7

Hello, thank you for your extensive reply, it is very reassuring.

  1. 2 or 3 per session
  2. I watch video #1, I finish it, then I do the related tags, then video #2, related tags etc
  3. I do not, but I guess I should.

I guess I was just worried about the 80% because. I switched from my own made cards, which had me hover at 85-88% for very new cards, compared to pre-made cards, and I didn’t make anything for microbiology, it was for other subjects. Thank you :slight_smile:

1 Like