What does the sun do to ocean water?
The method
Rereading is not enough. Remembering is.
A page reread four times gives a feeling of mastery that does not survive the exam. What improves is recognition: “yes, I've seen this”. And recognition is not what an exam asks for.
What holds is what you had to retrieve from memory, and what comes back just before you forget it. Two old ideas, measured for more than a century, and two ideas that are painful to apply by hand. That is all of Micabo's work.
Active recall: the question before the answer
Testing yourself is more effective than rereading, even when you get it wrong. The effort of retrieval is what strengthens the trace: an answer you search for for three seconds is worth more than an answer you read in one.
That is also why a card carries one thing to retrieve. A card that asks for five items at once cannot be graded: you recall three, and there is no button for “three fifths”.
Spacing: coming back at the last useful moment
Without review, what you retain from a course falls to almost nothing in a month. Each recall resets the counter to a hundred, and the drop that follows is slower than the previous one. Reviewing at the right moment does not take more time: it takes less, as memory stabilizes.
What matters is not the shape of each curve, it is where they split: the first review. What spaced repetition automates is the choice of that instant, card by card.
What Micabo calculates on every rating
Micabo schedules with SM-2, Anki's rule in its default settings. A new card goes through short steps, 1 min, then 10 min, before graduating to days. After that, each rating multiplies the interval by an ease that belongs to the card, starting at 2.5 and moving with your answers.
Four buttons, not two: “I know / I don't” does not distinguish the card retrieved with effort from the one that came on its own, and that gap is exactly what decides the next date. Here is what the four buttons announce on a new card:
What does the sun do to ocean water?
Again1 min
Hard6 min
Good10 min
Easy4 d
The intervals are computed by the app's scheduler, not written by hand.
The interval is written on the button before you press it. A scheduler that decides on its own is quickly disobeyed: you rate “easy” to go faster, the card leaves for three weeks, and you rediscover it on exam day.
Pace: what the workload asks for, not a quota
Micabo asks neither for a number of cards per day nor for a budget of minutes. It looks at what your deadlines require today, serves all of it, and tells you how long it will take. A student sees about 240 cards in an hour.
There used to be a cap on new cards, calibrated on the 8 passes a card needs before it sticks. It had one decisive flaw: three days before a midterm, it turned down cards from that very midterm in the name of the day's pace. Holding back work on the day it matters most is the wrong job.
The sheet first, the cards after
A card assumes you already understood. Testing yourself on a notion you have not read is learning an answer by heart without knowing what it is about: the card will be right, and the exam will not.
lecture.pdfFront and back Multiple choice
Three stages, one loop
Water changes state without ever leaving the planet: what evaporates from the oceans falls back on the continents, then returns. 71 % of evaporation comes from the oceans.
Condensation : Passage from vapor to the liquid state, around condensation nuclei.
- Ocean water evaporates under the sun's radiation.
- The vapour condenses high up and forms the clouds.
- Precipitation gives the water back to the land and the oceans.
Where does the vapor condense?
That is why Micabo first writes the sheet from your document: the course put back in order, the passages that matter marked. The cards are drawn from that sheet, not from the raw document. You read, then you test yourself.
Micabo never defines a term the document does not mention. When the context does not decide, the doubtful word does not appear on the sheet: an invented definition is perfectly credible, and that is what makes it dangerous.
Four ways to be questioned on the same sheet
Active recall is not limited to front and back. On one sheet, Micabo asks quizzes, fill-in-the-blanks and cards, and composes graded mock exams. The questions come from your documents, and the scheduler treats them all the same way: an answer you retrieve pushes the next one further out.
Mock exam
Points27/30GradeA
Quiz
Flashcard
Fill in the blank
What the method does not do
Spaced repetition places the reviews. It does not understand for you, it does not write an essay, and it does not catch up a chapter started the night before: there is no possible spacing over one night.
It also ignores dates, by design: SM-2 does not know an exam is in three weeks. That is exactly what exam mode is here to fix.
Read next
Exam mode
Spaced repetition ignores exam day. Micabo's exam mode gives it a deadline, tightens the passes as the test approaches, and stops a card from leaving past that date.
Micabo or Anki
Anki is open, proven, and excellent. Micabo writes the cards from your course and replans everything around an exam date. An honest comparison, including where Anki wins.
Drop a course, see what it becomes.
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