Setup a "only review" flashcard test using weights for different categories

[dementior]

Hi there!
I have been using pleco flashcards for a while and now I want to try a different approach that is actually not testing my direct knowledge of the flashcards themselves, but rather take advantage of its "random" ability to put cards together.

What I want to do is simple but I think not possible to achieve directly with pleco, please help me confirm this is the case.
I want to write compositions based on flashcards that appear on my test "review only" mixing 4 different categories. The categories will be: vocab from class, daily life vocab, grammar structures and patterns and finally chengyu.
I see pleco allows exclude categories or force to pick from one but what I want are weights to make sure I get enough patterns in every composition. For example: 30% vocab from class, 40% grammar, 20% daily life and 10% chengyu

These flashcards do not get any score here since I am using review only... Any idea how to achieve this?
thanks a lot

 

[mikelove]

Well, it's a bit of a hack, but you could theoretically do this now by setting "Card Selection" to "Weighted" and then batch adjusting the scores of cards in these categories to fit their weight. The weighting here is inverse - card with a score of 100 comes up twice as often as a card with a score of 200 - so if you wanted a typical card in grammar to come up on average about three times as often as a card from patterns, you would batch set all of the cards in grammar to have scores of 100 and all of the cards in patterns to have scores of 300.

 

[dementior]

thanks Mike!
let me try to play a bit with the weights to see what I can achieve.

 

[dementior]

Hi there,
I played a bit with the weights. The problem is that the cards get piled together before card selection, which means that still they do not get chosen in the right proportion.
The grammar category has only a few hundred cards while the others have thousands of cards. So in order to achieve the right proportion, I have to adjust the weights based on the number of cards...
Anyway, the easiest approach so far is to run twice the review test by filtering categories.
What I did find doing this, was a problem importing text file based flashcards: the text from definition gets trimmed... I will post this in bugs.
thx!

 

[mikelove]

Ah, yes, you would have to adjust the weights to reflect the different numbers of cards in each category. So the filtering approach might indeed be better for now.

We do have some very old limits on the size of custom cards that we haven't bothered to remove yet (mostly because we're waiting for our new multi-custom-field flashcard database to be ready so people can break up their long definitions into lots of useful little parts) - can check to see if that's the problem here or if something else is.