So say I have a course that I have finished a while ago and I want to keep my progress and the review intervals of the items, but I want to test myself some more. So I duplicate the items (let’s say there were 100) by bulk adding them into another level so that there are now 200.
If I am now tested on one copy of the pair, does that influence the review schedule of the other copy of the pair?
I don’t know the answer to your specific question but I do a similar thing in a different way.
From my Spanish courses, I duplicate ‘problem’ items that I want to test myself on some more into a separate “Spanish Revision” course that I created (and keep as ‘unlisted’). I then add and delete items from this "Spanish Revision"course as necessary.
When reviewing/watering, I prefer to do it course by course and, what I’ve noticed is that on days when an item comes up for review, its duplicate will also come up for review on the same day/in the same session (even if I answered the first test correctly). That may be because I usually add new items to my “Spanish Revision” course after I have got them wrong in a test in the item’s original course, causing both items to be in the same place in the review schedule.
I’m not completely sure what that is telling us. My guess is that the same would happen if the duplicate item is added to another level in the same course as you described. I guess there’s only one way to find out…
Hi @Arete_Hime can I offer a simple solution?
On all the courses I’ve created and non-EasyAcademy courses I support, I have created “Reserved levels”.
This is simple, one just duplicates a level and then reversed the testing direction. I either call it a reserved level or change the “Test A on B” to “Test B on A”.
Basically, as I am sure you know, MemRise tests both ways while learning, but only one way (the intended way) once learned (aka fully planted).
So by having a reversed level, one can learn it again (or test oneself as a refresher) and then water (aka review) it in the opposite way to the initial level.
What’s more I tend to choose which of the two levels I prefer to review, as one way may be more important - especially in a foreign language.
Have a look at some of my courses for an example, if you wish (“preview” should help):
http://www.memrise.com/user/DW7/courses/teaching/
To try to answer your original question - if you just duplicate items, then I think MemRise treats it as ONE entry so you may not be tested twice. However the beauty of my way, MemRise sees them as new items as they are the other way round.
Finally, a correction to a definition of an item on one of the levels obviously also amends it on the other duplicated reversed level - cunning!
I would confirm the 2 entries as one review. I have a Chinese course in which I put the HSK words in alphabetical order, as well as the same words are regrouped in logical sections (home, verbs, …)
When I learned one in one section I notice it got reviewed in the other section. Therefore Memrise considers it as one.
But I must say that I used the facility of having Memrise suggest me that word when I created the second section of my course (when you type a few letters and the database suggests to you the word from its general database)
I’ve seen several courses that have an item in more than one level. (Comprehensive German Duolingo Vocabulary is one of those courses.) If an item is in both lesson 3 and in lesson 37, for example, and I water lesson 37, it is also watered in lesson 3. I’m assuming that in both lessons, it’s referring to one entry in the database.
You may have to make sure you have your duplicate words in the database twice, such that the first time they show up in the course, they’re referring to their first entry in the database, and the second time they show up in the course, they’re referring to their second entry.
I can imagine that it might be tedious to do it word-by-word if you have more than a few items, but it might be possible to do it with a bulk upload by adding something new and/or different to one of the Attribute columns… For example, you already have “Spanish: tener, English: to have, Part of Speech: verb” in your database, so you add “Spanish: tener, English: to have, Part of Speech: verb (extra practice).” I suspect that you could choose an attribute column that’s not visible during testing, and it still should work.
Just a word of caution about duplicating the entry in the same course, as you could be presented with BOTH right answers to a phrase in a matching test, but only one is seen as the paired true answer.
However duplicating a level and reversing the testing direction as I mentioned above does treat it as a different test.
If you really want to be tested twice how about using the “restart” function or even duplicating the whole course (and keeping it unlisted so as not to confuse other people).
Hope those suggestions help.
Thanks everyone 
So it’s clear what I wanted to do originally won’t work. @kaspian’s workaround seems like it might work, but now I’m thinking it’s more straightforward to make a new course like @alanh suggested.
@DW7, your solution of changing the testing direction won’t really work for my courses and what I want to learn (recognizing words in Chinese). It’d be better to make a new course. Then I’d perhaps do a reading course with Chinese phrases, and the test being needing to type the tones of one of the words. Or something.
Hi @Arete_Hime, sorry those suggestions haven’t helped and I quite understand the reason.
Just another thought (sorry, I specialise in options and not giving up!)
As you’ve mentioned loading another set, if you loaded your entries in the reversed order, then I think it would be seen as new entries. (ie if English was in the first column and Chinese in the second, you now put Chinese in the first column).
Then all you need to do is to reverse the testing direction (effectively the same as the original set and what you wanted) and it should work.
However a duplicated course is probably the simplest if you don’t want to reset your learning and start each level from scratch (however the latter does have the advantage that it would keep your score for the course as well).
I may have missed the point here, but if you say you have finished the course but want to refresh by testing yourself, isn’t that what the “Review” option gives you?
It tests you on items you are not scheduled to review and you are only given 1 point for a right answer, but it might fulfil what you want.
Finally another thought - do you have the “Difficult words” orange button showing on your course? - where it knows which ones you need some extra practice.
Practice: no. I want to always only do one thing (review) or two things (learn & review), having to think about what to practice now is too much work. Also, if you get a word wrong when you use practice, you’re not presented with it again or more often later. Also, my course has 5000 items, I don’t trust that the algorithm will present me with the words evenly and randomly. Also, my thinking wasn’t very clear when I wrote my first post, I really only want to review a subset of the words in the course, not all of them.
Difficult words: this would have been the best option. I could mark those words I wanted to review more and review them. As I understand it however, you cannot review more than 20 difficult words at a time, if you want to review the next difficult words, you have to clear the list first. That behaviour makes the feature useless to me – excepts perhaps, if there is a way to see all the difficult words in a course, to copy that list and make a new course from them.
I was thinking it would be most useful to me if the accuracy of a word (say 34/45) was displayed in the level page. I could then export the list and filter on those words I was having difficulty with and put those in a new course.
The workaround I now use is to answer incorrectly the words that I am struggling with. That works reasonably well. The only thing with that is that I think the review intervals are too long for Chinese. I think if in a while I’m still not satisfied, I’ll just go through the list in Excel, note which words I’m still struggling with and make a course from those.
Hi @Arete_Hime,
Sorry nothing has been helpful - I tried.
I agree with your last comment, that it’s a good idea to make a course with just the difficult words. All the best with that.