I am 5 years old.
What is the relevance of that?
Tenho 5 anos de idade.
Qual a relevância disso?
1 Like
Sua idade não é importante. Eu acho que ela não é uma fã de seu Inglês.
Hi @Rodyzi - my suggestion would be to simply omit anyone with more than say 5000 points per word learned from any leaderboard. This could be done automatically with no need to modify any accounts. If such points come by repeatedly learning the same course (you’d have to do so many times destroying the concept of spaced repetition learning which is what Memrise promotes) then such users could continue to do that if they want - they just wouldn’t be recognised on the leaderboards.
I think that one line of code could go a long way to making the leaderboards more honest and inspirational.
2 Likes
I am Brazilian, I speak, read and write perfectly in my language.
Here in memrise I study Italian and I’m using google translator for these messages in English.
If she does not like, I’m sorry.
There will always be someone trying to cheat. It’s sad and it’s annoying, but that’s life.
In any case, cheating to get to the top of the leaderboards becomes irrelevant
when you realise that the entire Memrise leaderboard system is broken or, to use
modern parlance, not fit for purpose.
On almost every course, the only way to get to the top of the leaderboards (without
cheating) is to farm points using “Speed Review”. On Android, “Speed Review”
will get you up to 5000 points in just a few minutes – slightly less on the
website – and you can repeat it as many times as you want. This goes totally
against the concept of spaced-repetition promoted by Memrise. It quickly gets
to the stage where it isn’t achieving anything at all except bumping up your
score to move you up the leaderboard. The leaderboards, as they stand, don’t
encourage learning, they encourage silly point-farming.
My suggestion for improving the situation would be to firstly, remove the
points-farm by drastically reducing the points to be gained from “Speed Review”.
Maybe take it all the way down to 1 point for a correct answer instead of the
50 points currently available on Android. This would discourage frivolous use of
“Speed Review” and put more emphasis back onto spaced-repetition. Secondly, I
would remove the all-time leaderboards entirely and replace them with a list of
people who have completed the course, maybe ranked by their current average spaced-repetition
interval. This would encourage people to keep on top of their reviews even
after completing the course, because if they fell behind they would drop down
the list. It would also be very difficult to get to the top of this board by
cheating. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t stop the current cheats from getting to
the top of the weekly and monthly boards, but then they’d have to keep coming
back and repeating their cheating every week/month.
1 Like