When learning a new word, it would be helpful for memrise to display the average success rate for answering it across the entire userbase. For example an easy word might be answered correctly by users 90% of the time, whereas a hard one only 60%. Displaying this information would be helpful to flag up early on words that may require extra attention. Maybe each word could be given a colour-coding for difficulty this way.
Green colour: "Users answered this word correctly 90% of the time"
Red colour: "Users answered this word correctly 60% of the time"
On a technical level, I know that for each individual user memrise keeps track of the number of times you answered a word and how many of those are correct, so to average this across all users and show a percentage seems within the realm of feasibility.
Of course, there are nuances that may need ironing out, such as the removal of outliers like a user somewhere out there who attempts every word on a course a thousand times per day and gets them all wrong. But overall I do believe it would be a useful indicator.
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@two-generals-problem Thank you for the feature request. Can you say what you would actually do differently if you had this information?
@James_g_memrise
Having this information would let me know in advance which words are likely to require extra effort to remember. Just making an extra effort to remember something is helpful towards remembering it. I might come up with a pneumonic or select a mem. I might also look the word up in a dictionary. Lastly, it would make me more inclined to mark a word as difficult on memrise if I knew lots of other people had a hard time with it.
Thank you for explaining further. All requests do get logged and collated but understanding the need behind it is always important as there may be alternate solutions that can help meet the same need.
To be honest I don’t see us implementing this request because:
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most community courses don’t have enough learners to generate a robust accuracy score for each word
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official courses already flex the number of tests based on average accuracy
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I’m not sure how much extra value most people would get from seeing an accuracy score, just by seeing the item you can see how challenging it looks to you as an individual, and then you have 6 tests to Learn the word and it should be clear while doing them if it’s difficult, and if you get a test wrong it goes into difficult words.
Unfortunately we have a very large list of things we want to build all fighting for a limited amount of developer time so things have to be very compelling to rise to the top.