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I'm currently using their recommended amount but I think once I have everything flagged I'll probably do 3-400 per day as you said, to get mastery up
You have to make it a priority. 150-160 isn't horrible. If you're focused you can do that in an 45 minutes- an hour depending on your mastery. Really unfocused maybe 2-2.5 hours. Either way if you're sleeping 7-8 hours/day you still have 14 more hours to do stuff. The biggest thing is just managing your time, especially if you have mandatory class like my school
If I don't understand something I usually just google it. I don't really take notes from firecracker unless I think it's important to annotate something into First Aid
You can look at the information. I almost never do though, but it's available
Yeah I'm about 190 right now, but it's adaptive now and it wasn't before. Before it only took into account goal score and test date, so it treated all of us M2's who have been using it for a year like an M1, so you would expect the load to decrease once the features were implemented. It makes sense, if you already have 40% of the bank mastered you shouldn't be doing as much as someone who just started.
There are definitely people in this thread that have commented on it being useful that have done super well. There is also data (although could be selection bias) that supports their claims. You can pretty much google "firecracker scored 250" or whatever and you will find countless testimonials about people using it to score very well. I also think that many people who score really will disagree with "most of 1st year material is not relevant to the boards".
I'll leave it to the actual students on this thread to give you their personal impressions, but just a few quick thoughts: M3 is by far our fastest growing group of students, so there is certainly a large number of students using the system for wards and Step 2. Also, we often ask past FC students who have been successful on either Step 1 or 2 to explain how they used FC to achieve their score. We post these to our blog fairly often. If you're curious, here's a link to one that was posted today. Hopefully that sheds a bit of light, but obviously let me know if you have any specific questions. I'll do my best to respond quickly.
Great stuff. That's very similar to the implementation we are currently proposing. The two main problem here - what we are most focused on avoiding - revolve around recency bias. First, we don't want students to incorrectly assume they know the concepts better than they really do simply because they've seen it several times in a short amount of time. Second, we need to keep in mind how the algorithm should be affected. We certainly don't want to log each review within the same session as different review sessions because it will trick the algorithm into thinking you've seen the question many times, thus assigning it at incorrect intervals in the future. A few of the many considerations that make this more involved than just adding a quick shuffle back in button.
Mind if I DM you to ask a bit more about the second part of this, i.e. edit questions/answers? Now is a great time for me to really dive into features like this.
Shuffle by far is the most important (imo, and also factual 🙂)
Thanks! I put a reminder in my phone.
Great question. Going to piggy back on this if I can. Curious about how you all go about making the most of dedicated. Would love some insight into this. A few questions:
I plan on using it still, maybe an hour or so in the morning before I get rolling. We'll see when the time comes if I feel the same.
1. 5 weeks
I don't remember exactly how long I had. I believe I used 4 of the 7 weeks I had off. I was 75% flagged at that point. I didn't flag anything extra unless I just needed to drive home a principle that I was getting wrong in UWorld.
