how are points assigned to sentences? When I finish the sentence correctly on the first try, I have received 8, 12, 16 or 24 points. The points seem to change day by day. Yesterday and today I got only 8 points. The previous few days I got upto 24 points per sentence.
I have set 10 sentences per session. So two days ago I was getting 200+; today for a session I am getting 80+ points.
What is the explanation?
I signed up for 6 months, so not free. I think that allows me PRO privleges.
It depends on how you answer the sentence. If you type it in (or use speaking mode) you get double the points that you would get compared to using the multiple choice option.
It won’t be on your first try. In a standard exercise (by which I mean “Fluency Fast Track”, “Most Common Words”, “Grammar Challenges”, etc), your score increases every time you answer the question up to the 4th time.
The first time you see it, it is 0% mastered. You will get 4 points for getting it right if you use multiple choice, 8 points if you use typing/speaking.
The next time you see it, if you got it right the first time, it is 25% mastered. (Obviously this does not tie to reality; some words you will need to see dozens of times in different contexts, some you “get” straight away. However it’s how the system works.) If you answer it correctly, you will get 8 points if you use multiple choice, 16 if you use typing or speaking. If you get it wrong, it goes back to 0% mastered and you start again.
(When is “the next time you see it”? It will be in your “Ready for Review” section after a certain number of days. How MANY days depends on what you have your Review Settings set to.)
If you did get it right again, the next time you see it it will be 50% mastered. Get it right one more time, and you get 12 points if you use multiple choice, 24 if you type / speak it. Get it wrong, and… we know what happens.
If you keep getting it right, the next time you see it it will be 75% mastered because you will have answered it correctly 3 out of a possible 4 times. If you get it right again, you will get 16 points if you use the multiple choice option, 32 points if you use the typing/ speaking option.
And that’s it, that’s the maximum number of points that you can score on a sentence. If it shows up in a Review and you still get it right, you get 32 points again and it stays as 100% mastered. (The mastery percentage should appear at the top right of the screen.) It will STAY at 100% mastered unless either (a) You get it wrong, and it resets to 0% and you start again; or (b) You click on the reset button for the sentence (which does the same thing) or (c) You reset the whole collection that the sentence is in (which also does the same thing, but for every sentence in the collection.)
Some special categories have different scoring systems. Playing a sentence in your “Favourites” collection (if you have any) will get you only 2 points, no matter how you play it. With Cloze Reading you have to select from a multiple choice list and get only 4 points per word, 2 if your first entry is wrong. I don’t believe that Cloze Listening gives any points at all.
Your profile shows you:
Playing 1,148 sentences
Mastered 18 sentences
So my GUESS would be that you were recently playing sentences which were closer to mastery (the 18 that you have mastered) and which were earning you higher points, but you’re now doing a greater bunch of new sentences which are probably only at 25% mastery. That’s a relatively low “mastered” percentage so I suspect that you’re doing more (a LOT more) new sentences rather than staying on top of your Reviews (which is what will yield the higher point counts).
That one doesn’t have anything to do with it. Non-pros earn the same points in the same way… but they are restricted to doing 30 sentences per day.
Hopefully this answers your questions. The system isn’t that unintuitive but it could probably be explained better in the Help system. Hopefully this post covers the bases in that regard.
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Thank you so much for your reply. Covers all my questions.
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What happens if you use text input on a sentence that you previously answered using multiple choice? For example, if I used multiple choice to get to 25%, then at the review, you get it right using text input? Do you get 8 points or 16 points?
16 points. It doesn’t matter how you got to 25% (multiple choice or text input).
With multiple choice, your points increase in this sequence:
4, 8, 12, 16
With text input, the sequence is doubled:
8, 16, 24, 32
At any of these four steps, you can switch from text input to multiple or vice versa. So, assuming you start with multiple choice and use text input for the last two steps, you’d get 4, 8, 24, 32 points.
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Thanks for the clarification. So if I toggled back and forth and did MC for 25%, Text for 50%, MC for 75%, and Text for 100%, then the points would be 4, 16, 12, 32?
I think so, yes.
(Ignore this, I just need 20 characters before I can reply.)
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Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to fully explain it. I just did a review of 3 sentences, going from 50% to 75%, and I got a 12 for each of them. I was doing text input, and did so each round, so I should have gotten 24 for all of them, no?
I found this and it still doesn’t explain my situation. (I was reviewing them when they came up for review, so not too early.)
One possibility is that these are sentences that I have gotten wrong at the first try, so at 0%, I got +4 instead of +8 and that puts the sentence on the half-the-point track? Even this theory doesn’t really hold as I tried a couple other sentences which I played twice and got them correct each time, and I got +8 instead of +16 the third time I answered it correctly.
So I am completely stumped! @mike help clarify please?
Looking at your profile, I’m guessing that this was in French from English. If so, you may well be hitting an issue that was discussed in THIS THREAD.
In SOME languages, trying to continue to review clozes when there are no more to be reviewed gets you the {stream of invective} crying Pikachu gif. But in French, you can keep reviewing to your heart’s content without an accursed Pikachu in sight… but only get half points for it.
That would be consistent with what you’re seeing above.
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Thank you for the link to the other thread and for the explanation. Yes, I am doing French from English.
Unfortunately I was getting these half points on the sentences played from the “Review” section, i.e., they were ready for review. What a mystery. I am baffled!
And I have seen that not-so-cute Pikachu too many times, so I think that “bug” in French has been “fixed”?
Update: I believe the mystery has been solved. The time zone for CM is set as central european time (CET) which is where I live, and my computer was set for the US Eastern time due to my work being based there. And I believe that was causing the discrepancy. As I was doing the reviews soon after midnight on October 3rd CET, the sentences due on Oct 3rd showed up based on my CM time zone. However, when I actually do the review and press next, CM must be checking my computer time which says Oct 2nd 6:10 pm. So it is penalizing me for reviewing these sentences “too early”!
I just realized that I don’t seem to have the same issue on my phone, which led me to this theory. And to test this theory, I changed my computer time setting, in the middle of a review session, and voilà it went from giving me half points to giving me full points.
Sorry for wasting everyone’s time with an edge-case question and thank you for kindly answering me @davidculley and @LuciusVorenusX!
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