Amboss Anki Add-On groups related cards in study sessions

When you create a study session based on previously matured cards, it seems to group all the related cards together. This can make the answers of subsequent questions obvious. (For example you answer a question on rheumatoid arthritis and the next questions are also about RA, giving away the answer in many cases). It would be nice if it randomized the order of the cards.

In performance.py:

def sample_items(items: list, max_items: int, reproducible: bool = True) -> list:
    if max_items >= len(items):
        return items
    if reproducible:
        seed(md5(dumps(items).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest())
    sampled = [items[i] for i in sorted(sample(range(len(items)), max_items))]
    if reproducible:
        seed()
    return sampled

It seems sample_items will keep the ids sorted. It seems this is done for the sake of reproducibility. However if qbank IDs from certain topics on Amboss are often grouped together, numerically, this will result in 

In controller.py, the qbank is created from a list of question_ids.

            self.start_question_session(
                question_ids=question_ids,
                statuses=self._question_statuses,
                request_origin=RequestOrigin.anki_home_qbank_widget,
                sidepanel=True,
                max_size=max_size,
            )

There's quite a lot of steps between these two pieces, but my thought is that these questions_ids are never being shuffled.

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Comments (1)

  • Official
    Comment actions Permalink

    Hi there- thank you for sharing your feedback with us regarding the way Qbank sessions are created through our Anki & Qbank integration! We greatly appreciate your insights, as they will help us improve this new feature even further :) 

    We definitely understand your concern about related cards being grouped together in Qbank sessions, making it easier to guess subsequent answers. Your suggestion to randomize the order of the cards makes a lot of sense, and I have passed along your feedback to our developers who will take this into consideration for future improvements. We will definitely explore ways to ensure better randomization in Qbank sessions created through our Anki add-on. 

    Thank you once again for bringing this to our attention, and please feel free to reach out to us at hello@amboss.com with any further feedback or questions. Take care!

    Best, 
    Maddie from the AMBOSS team

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