Spaced repetition is made for remembering things in the long run. An exam asks for something else: as much as possible, on one particular morning. So while an exam is being prepared for, Memorics plans its cards differently.
The plan uses the same memory of each card as spaced repetition (see How Memorics schedules your reviews). It doesn’t change how memory works, only which cards you study on which day. Everything you answer for an exam counts for spaced repetition too, so nothing has to be studied twice.
Readiness
Readiness is your chance of remembering each of the exam’s cards on the morning of the exam, averaged over all of them, with cards you haven’t learned yet counting as zero. It’s what you’d know if you stopped studying now.
Because it already looks ahead to the morning of the exam, readiness doesn’t drop as the days go by. Only studying moves it.
Learning the new cards
New cards are spread evenly over the study days, at least 5 a day, so a small topic is learned over a few days rather than all on the first. The last fifth of the study days, at least 2, learn no new cards. They leave time for reviewing and relearning what you’ve learned. Cards added to the exam’s topics later fill the learning days that are left, or, once those are over, are learned on the next study day.
Reviewing
A card you learned comes back on the next study day, the review that does the most for a fresh memory. After that, the gaps grow, from 1 to 2 to 4 days, with two limits:
- A card never waits so long that your chance of remembering it falls below the level’s floor (see the levels below), so each review takes some effort but still succeeds.
- A gap stays below about 40% of the days left until the exam. Research on spacing suggests the best gap between study sessions is about 20 to 40% of the time until the test.
A card you’ve seen on enough days, and that you’re likely enough to remember on the morning of the exam, isn’t studied again until the final pass. Your time goes to the cards that need it.
Even days
Every study day aims for about the same amount of work, rather than a few long days and many short ones. On a light day, Memorics brings forward the reviews you’re least likely to remember on the exam’s morning. On a heavy day, it moves the reviews with the most margin to the next study day, but never past the point where you’d be likely to forget them.
Missed days
If you miss a study day, its reviews are studied today, the ones closest to being forgotten first, as long as today stays about its usual size. If that would make today too long, they’re spread over the next 3 study days instead.
The final pass
The last study days before the exam are the final pass: the last 2 for a plan of a week or less, and the last 3 for a longer one. Every card that isn’t known well enough comes back once more, the strongest first and the weakest on the last day, the closest to the exam. The day of the exam itself has nothing planned.
When time is short
With fewer than three study days left and work still to do, the plan crams. Each day then has two rounds: the first whenever you study, the second three hours after you finish it, if that’s before 10 in the evening, so cards come back within the day. A plan followed from its start never has to cram. Cramming is only for when the time is short, which is why an exam less than three days away crams from the start.
The levels
How well prepared you choose sets how ready the plan aims to get you, and how much work that takes:
- Save time aims for an 85% chance on the morning of the exam, never lets a card fall below 70% in between, and needs one Good for a new card in a session. The final pass covers cards below 85%.
- Balanced aims for 92%, keeps cards above 80%, and needs two Goods in a row for a new card. The final pass covers cards below 95%.
- Best results aims for 97%, keeps cards above 85%, and needs three Goods in a row for a new card. The final pass covers every card.
The forecast
The minutes a day and the readiness you see when you add an exam come from playing the plan through to the day of the exam, card by card, with the same memory model. It assumes you sometimes forget a card, as often as the model expects, and that you answer at your own pace. So the more you study, the better the forecast fits you.
After the exam
Once the exam is done, its cards go back to spaced repetition with everything you built up. Since they were all studied in the same few days, they would otherwise all come due together a few weeks later. So while an exam is being prepared for, its answers spread the cards’ next reviews out more widely than usual, and they come back gradually instead.