It took 6+ months for 2019H1 QCVC readers to reach the 1 month level

In theory, it’s possible to reach the 1-month level after about 2 months with our original schedule. In practice, it’s taking most of our readers much longer than that. This makes it hard for us to see what’s happening: as of Dec 2019 we can’t measure 1-month attainment rates reliably for cohorts after June.

In fact, we can barely measure May and June accurately. As of Dec 2019, looking at QCVC readers who registered in May 2019:

• 93 finished the in-text level
• 41 finished the 2-week level
• 25 reached the 1 month level
• …but 8 (~20%) of the 2-week readers are still actively reviewing—they just still haven’t finished the 1-month level yet, over 6 months later!

(see dashboard)

So how many will ultimately reach 1 month? Hard to say!

What’s taking so long? Well, in (Superseded) Lapsed question accuracy remains iffy, despite retry and interval-shortening we saw that lapsed 1-month questions had a 72% accuracy rate on their next attempt. Each re-attempt adds 6 weeks (2 weeks to re-do the previous interval level, plus 4 weeks to re-attempt 1 month), so we’d see these results for users with 3+ lapses for 5+% of questions at the 1 month level. Fairly plausible.

My guess is that this feels frustrating now that we’ve rolled out the new progress representations—possibly more so than it felt without it! It would be interesting to interview users who are still at 2 weeks after 6+ months.

Relates to andymatuschak/qcc#360 Finishing the 4-month memory level will likely take years .