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Spaced repetition is great for material which is divided into very small chunks and where you have a ton of time for comparatively little information (Vocabular

Spaced repetition is great for material which is divided into very small chunks and where you have a ton of time for comparatively little information (Vocabulary, especially in languages you are not learning for a degree). Problems arise in practical situations when you want to pass an exam. Or a couple of them in a certain period of time. Proponents of SR will say that it takes at least 6 times the amount of time/effort over learning "short term". So if you are learning for an exam, you better have plenty of time to spare. And you better start early, like 6 months before the exam. All that makes it pretty useless in a lot of situations I've been in. Short term learning isn't as bad as it looks. If you really "cram" for an exam, and you think you forgot all of it a couple of days or weeks later, that's not what happened. Instead, your brain is now primed for the material, and when you come into contact with it later, a lot of information is still there and re-learning will be easier.

kiba 13y ago
Proponents of SR will say that it takes at least 6 times the amount of time/effort over learning "short term". So if you are learning for an exam, you better have plenty of time to spare. And you better start early, like 6 months before the exam. All that makes it pretty useless in a lot of situations I've been in. This is a bit of a strawman. If you need to pass an exam quickly, you should and will "cram". Afterward, you can resume your spaced repetition learning.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  For me, exam-focused learning has been the norm, not the exception. I don't hear very often that people use these SR systems continuously for years, and if so, it's usually in language learning
- tunesmith 13y ago
  I don't think it's a straw man, because then after the exam you have to take new classes. College simply moves too fast to retain everything you've learned. I can't seem to add more than 20-30 cards a day in my Anki deck, or my review load gets bigger and bigger. If college worked more like a semester of classes, then a semester off to focus on retention and shrink the deck load, maybe that would work.
_greim_ 13y ago
Assuming you're paying to be educated about a certain thing, and you actually want the knowledge and not just the diploma, walking away merely being "primed" to learn it later isn't the best outcome. As an analogy, cramming is better than failing the exam as driving into the ditch is better than a collision. However, best to avoid either scenario in the first place.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  For me that would have meant avoiding getting the degrees I wanted to get. Bad option.
mistercow 13y ago
This is a bug with exams (and if you're in a situation where you need to cram, your study habits), not with spaced repetition. The fact that it's harder to pass exams while using learning strategies that enable long term retention is one of the main reasons for the disparity between academic achievement and actual competence.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  The bug seems to be in my learning efficiency and time management. To learn some material for the long term, I would need about a year or two between having the lecture and the exam. Plus I'd need about six to ten times the amount of time to study. Time I just didn't have to spare. The big misunderstanding is that an education is not about the amount or ratio of details retained in memory, but rather the mental infrastructure that was built by learning it, even for a short period of time. I don't even agree that there is such a "disparity between academic achievement and actual competence". Anyone who demands more long term strategies has to demand a big reduction in the amount of information studied or increase the duration of the educational programs.
  - mistercow 13y ago
    I think you're conflating latency and bandwidth. The total amount of time spent actually studying a given fact with spaced repetition (to get it in long term memory) is comparable to the amount of time spent studying that fact when cramming for an exam. The difference is that that time is spread over months instead of over a few hours. The bandwidth is roughly equivalent, but the latency is much higher. So if you use SRS effectively, you can actually spend considerably less time studying. If you cram for each test, you're essentially crunching a bunch of data into short term memory, forgetting it, and then having to crunch a lot of it back in for the next exam. Then, for the final, you end up having to cram all of it in. Essentially, you're paying the cost of short term memorization over and over again, every time you have an exam. If you use SRS and use it daily over the course of the entire semester, you'll only pay that cost once. And since you'll still have the information in your brain in between exams, your mind will be able to more effectively connect new information to old than if you cram and forget.

kiba 13y ago

Proponents of SR will say that it takes at least 6 times the amount of time/effort over learning "short term". So if you are learning for an exam, you better have plenty of time to spare. And you better start early, like 6 months before the exam. All that makes it pretty useless in a lot of situations I've been in. This is a bit of a strawman. If you need to pass an exam quickly, you should and will "cram". Afterward, you can resume your spaced repetition learning.

bayesianhorse 13y ago
For me, exam-focused learning has been the norm, not the exception. I don't hear very often that people use these SR systems continuously for years, and if so, it's usually in language learning
tunesmith 13y ago
I don't think it's a straw man, because then after the exam you have to take new classes. College simply moves too fast to retain everything you've learned. I can't seem to add more than 20-30 cards a day in my Anki deck, or my review load gets bigger and bigger. If college worked more like a semester of classes, then a semester off to focus on retention and shrink the deck load, maybe that would work.

_greim_ 13y ago

Assuming you're paying to be educated about a certain thing, and you actually want the knowledge and not just the diploma, walking away merely being "primed" to learn it later isn't the best outcome. As an analogy, cramming is better than failing the exam as driving into the ditch is better than a collision. However, best to avoid either scenario in the first place.

bayesianhorse 13y ago
For me that would have meant avoiding getting the degrees I wanted to get. Bad option.

mistercow 13y ago

This is a bug with exams (and if you're in a situation where you need to cram, your study habits), not with spaced repetition. The fact that it's harder to pass exams while using learning strategies that enable long term retention is one of the main reasons for the disparity between academic achievement and actual competence.

bayesianhorse 13y ago
The bug seems to be in my learning efficiency and time management. To learn some material for the long term, I would need about a year or two between having the lecture and the exam. Plus I'd need about six to ten times the amount of time to study. Time I just didn't have to spare. The big misunderstanding is that an education is not about the amount or ratio of details retained in memory, but rather the mental infrastructure that was built by learning it, even for a short period of time. I don't even agree that there is such a "disparity between academic achievement and actual competence". Anyone who demands more long term strategies has to demand a big reduction in the amount of information studied or increase the duration of the educational programs.
- mistercow 13y ago
  I think you're conflating latency and bandwidth. The total amount of time spent actually studying a given fact with spaced repetition (to get it in long term memory) is comparable to the amount of time spent studying that fact when cramming for an exam. The difference is that that time is spread over months instead of over a few hours. The bandwidth is roughly equivalent, but the latency is much higher. So if you use SRS effectively, you can actually spend considerably less time studying. If you cram for each test, you're essentially crunching a bunch of data into short term memory, forgetting it, and then having to crunch a lot of it back in for the next exam. Then, for the final, you end up having to cram all of it in. Essentially, you're paying the cost of short term memorization over and over again, every time you have an exam. If you use SRS and use it daily over the course of the entire semester, you'll only pay that cost once. And since you'll still have the information in your brain in between exams, your mind will be able to more effectively connect new information to old than if you cram and forget.