They CAN… but unless I’m missing something they’d be back to 8 points per question. They’d have to build back up to 32 over the following 4 days.
I’d agree that 7 days is too short for system rorters (let’s be blunt, that’s what we’re talking about here) but every few months would be to my mind like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, it’s true that using Clozemaster shouldn’t be about scoring points (or not exclusively anyway), but getting reduced points just because you’re reviewing within several months feels like a disincentive. I’d agree that it would be justified if people remembered perfectly something that they had seen multiple times… but in real life it doesn’t happen. For a genuine student there are thousands of words competing for your attention, plus everything else in your life competing for memory space. Granted my memory isn’t the best in the business but I’m sure I’m not the only one who has seen more than a few words which are “100% mastered”, but which we have no memory of. (Mostly these would be words which we have nothing to connect them to; no common etymology with known words, no sounds that relate to the meaning, and often which are important but not used frequently.) If you had to wait several months to review them… that would not be a good thing.
It’s one reason why I never play the Favourites collection; 2 points per question makes it feel like you’re slogging through thick mud as punishment. (Though I do get that the 2 points per question was (probably) implemented to avoid the kind of rorting that we’re talking about.)
The other reason that I don’t concern myself with Favourites any longer is that once you get a few hundred entries in there stretching back over months you can rarely remember much less find what you may have added 2, 3, 4 months ago. That’s not a criticism, incidentally, I do think that HAVING a Favourites group is both a good and necessary idea, it just doesn’t work for me. I’m finding that a better approach is to create custom collections broken up by topic.
On which point, by the time I hit 32 on one of those I’ve seen the question at least 4 times. I’m fine with not seeing it again for 3 or 4 weeks (which is the minimum range in which I set my mastered review anyway), but not 2, 3, 6 months from now. That would not be useful to me. And scoring fewer points were I to review it within that period would feel punitive and a disincentive.
Let’s be completely blunt; there are people who are rorting the system mercilessly to get their names into the leaderboard. I don’t think there is any way to stop that from happening. If this change were to be implemented I can think of at least one way around it, though it would require a lot of setup work. I do however agree that making it harder for them to do this is worth doing.
Sometimes the system-gamers niggle because it means that people who work hard at their learning rather than at gaming the system won’t have their day in the sun. But most of the time I think “so THAT’S what you want to do with your life? Game a system to get your name (or more commonly handle) to the top of a leader board that most of the planet will never see? Hmm. Interesting.” I find it impossible to take the leaderboards too seriously because it’s blatantly obvious how much some of the scores are about rorting the system rather than studying. I keep tabs of where I am on the overall standings, and who is ahead of me and their score, but that’s just a variation of the old army training technique; “Say to yourself ‘I’ll run to that tree, then I can rest’. And when you get to that tree, point to another one and say ‘I’ll run to THAT tree, and then I can rest’” That just keeps you going. However there’s really no incentive to aspire to being “Number 1”. Still, as I said… there’s no reason to make it easy for someone if they want to spend their days that way. It’s unfair to people who really want to learn.