Is fixing the testing direction REALLY impossible?

Community-Created Courses Course Creator's Corner
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I’m finding it hard to believe that you can’t create a course level which is tested in one direction only.

What I’m creating is a basic course on German article declensions. So it’s “test on German” (e.g. “der”), prompt on English (e.g. “The (m. nominative)”). The trouble is that the German answers aren’t unique: every single declined form (der/die/das/den/dem/des) acts as more than one case. So it makes sense to test only with the English prompts (which are unique).

But Memrise doesn’t seem to allow this one direction. Also, it’ll often give you a multiple choice of German answers, without recognising that many of the answers are effectively identical. So you can be faced with the choice between 3 different "der"s, without knowing which one is (in a hidden way) the “correct” one.

Is there really no way round this?

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You can always add attributes shown in tests

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The initial learning session (what used to be called planting) is always in both directions. All review from then on is only in the direction you chose, based on what you set as “test on” and “prompt with”.

Memrise officially claims not to support columns with duplicates - that is, the same word in multiple entries in the same column. In practice, that’s not really true, and lots of people do it. However, they use alts or extra synonym columns to deal with some of the issues that causes.

Also, I think Memrise used to have code that avoided presenting duplicates of the correct answer as multiple choice answers on the same question, but that stopped working a few weeks ago. At least, that’s the impression I got from another recent thread. But it’s unclear, and with all the bigger bugs memrise has been introducing recently and not yet fixing, I don’t know if we could get attention for this one.

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Multiples (in multiple tests) are working ok. I just had to delete 2 infected ones…

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Thanks for your reply. I’m definitely getting duplicates presented in multiple-choice tests. What I mean is that my database contains multiple entries where the German (test on) is “die” (but the English prompt is different) - and I get multiple "die"s presented as possible answers in MC.

I’m not sure how I could use alts to solve the problem. I never want to ask people to be prompted with “die” and type any one of “feminine nominative”, “feminine accusative”, “plural nominative” or “plural accusative” (or even variants): AFAIK that’s what alts would be useful for (e.g. to accept “cargo compartment of ship” or “grasp” as an answer to “hold”).

I guess I can put up with questions being asked in the “wrong” direction just during the planting phase - but that doesn’t solve the “multiple duplicates” problem in MC tests, which will continue to be a problem in review. (Another question - is there a way to fake the passage of time and force a review when testing a course?)

thanks for any ideas!

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Thanks also for your reply - I’ve kept my reply in one place, rather than trying to reply separately to you and to cos. In this case, attributes can’t guide the user without giving away the answer, I think.

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You just need to be really creative, and put the right words in alternatives

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You can make them unique by making a single English prompt for ‘der’ that reads something like:

The (m.nominative, f.genitive, f.dative, pl.genetive, pl.dative).

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That would certainly get around Memrise’s problem in this area. Unfortunately, picking the correct (same) answer for each of those 4 prompts, as separate questions, while dealing with the difficulty that many of the answers for different prompts are the same, is exactly the point of the course. I want the user to be prompted with e.g. “f.dative” and have to think “oh, is that the one that’s the same as m.nominative? Remember, quick!”. A compound prompt of the kind you’re suggesting won’t help the user to quickly remember any of its components.

I’m getting the feeling that Memrise is based on a one-to-one relationship between prompts and answers, and in particular can’t deal with deduplicating answers that are identical to each other: so that any question whose answer is “die” can be answered with “die”, rather than Memrise treating the separate instances of “die” it has on its database as separate answers, only one of which is correct.

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If A is B and C and D. You can put it this way that every time you see B, D or C in multiple tests you’ll pick A and vice versa. When the question is A you only have B or C or D in multiple choices. Ppl use it a lot.

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Would it be possible in your application to create just a few stock sentences with a blank before the article and then test which one would fit? For example:

  • Ich brauche ___ Wecker which tests to (den, m. Akk)
  • ___ Wecker ist kaputt which tests to (der, m. Nom)
  • Ich fahre mit ___ (and then just pick a word per gender and test appropriately)

If you pick simple words that all have different plural forms people only have to learn a few word genders and this might be a workaround.

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I find that Memrise has code to only present one answer if there are several ones which are the same, but only in one direction (shall we call it ‘forward’? ie in the direction you’re learning.)
There appears to be no filtering where there are multiple possible solutions the other way, ie when it presents you the word in the language you are learning, and you have to pick the one in your original language, as the clues are not unique I presume.
This is only a problem whilst learning, afterwards you are not presented with reverse picklists anymore. But essentially this implies that there can ever only be one word which translates to a specific work in your ‘learning’ language, which of course is not the case.

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Cos gave a really good explanation above:

The initial learning session (what used to be called planting) is always in both directions. All review from then on is only in the direction you chose, based on what you set as “test on” and “prompt with”.

For this reason I duplicate levels and reverse the testing so both ways can be used for ‘watering’ aka revision.

In your case you don’t want the other way.

Assuming you are the creator or a contributor, you could “auto_learn” so skip the learning process then you will only be tested the way you want.

Anyway have you seen this thread which may also help:

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@Lien @angileptol

Hi, I’ve also noticed that there have been changes to the Memrise algorithm in the past few weeks.

An improved feature is that I’m seeing very similar multiple choice possible “incorrect” answers (from within the course) come up - which makes multiple choice tests more challenging and better.

Unfortunately, some identical answers are now being presented in multiple choice tests, and the learner can’t tell which is the correct one to click.

This issue crops up in my Spanish Verbs courses, where I’ve very frequently got identical Spanish answers to different English clues, for example:

I think that solving this issue might require only a small (but very beneficial) change to the algorithm? Any consideration and assistance with this would be appreciated!

Thank you, - Ian.

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I use a course I made to drill German genders so all the answers are die der or das and find that when you get a multiple choice question obviously only die der or das are presented with duplicates. I’ve found you can tap any instance and have it marked correct. Have you actually been marked wrong ever in an instance like this?

The only annoyance is when it suggests a whole screen of 6 die to choose from… but this is unlikely to happen to you as there are only a few duplicates.

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Hi, This is interesting - I’m familiar with German and thanks for your comment.

My main issue today has been with multiple choice questions where a Spanish word is listed at the top, and a group of English translations are listed as the possible answers.

Very often, I see two different perfectly valid English translations listed, in which case I have only a 50% chance of getting the answer marked “correct” by Memrise. If I’m unlucky, I get marked wrong even though I clicked on a valid correct answer.

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I’ve tried various possibilities, but there seems to be no solution.

(@makalu’s suggestion, while useful, is just adding some context to the question and making it about actual usage, rather than about the dry grammatical prompts (e.g. “F. genitive”) which I used. That’s a good idea, but it doesn’t solve the multiple-meanings problem.)

1. I created a course where each German word appears once (i.e. one row), but with multiple English alt prompts. This solves the “which of the identical-looking answers is the correct one?” problem. But I never get prompted with the alts - only with the primary English meaning. So, for example, for “der”, I get prompted with “The (nominative M.)” - but never with “The (F. dative)”, “The (F. genitive)” or “The (plural genitive)”, all of which are equally-important uses of the same German word “der”.

2. I tried creating a course with one row per German word. But instead of using Alts, I added multiple extra columns, because (somewhere else) someone suggested that you could test on multiple columns. So my columns for “der” look like this (in one single row):

German: der
English: The (M. nominative)
German2: der
English2: The (F. dative)
German3: der
English3: The (F. genitive)
German4: der
English4: The (plural genitive)

Then I continued creating another row for each other unique form of the German article: since only “der” and “die” have 4 usages, some of the columns weren’t used for the other forms “das”, “den”, “des” and “dem”.

The idea is that I could set up the course to Test on German, Prompt with English; Test on German2, Prompt with English2; Test on German3; Prompt with English3; Test on German4, Prompt with English4.

But this is not possible. Memrise only allows you to set one pair of columns in a course for “test on, prompt with”. So this course, while it does show all the other columns (German2-4, English 2-4) when teaching you, which is nice, never tests you on them.

The trouble is, I think, that these multiple English meanings for the same German word are not really “alternative” meanings - nice-to-know but not essential. They’re all equally important, so that a course to teach them should test on every single one of them, rather than treating the first meaning as the only important one.

I’m beginning to think that Memrise, as it stands now, simply can’t handle this kind of multiple-meanings course.

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@DW7 has clarified how to do this on another thread here: http://community.memrise.com/t/one-word-with-different-meanings/3755/11.

The good news is that you can make this work. The bad news is that it’s quite complicated. The second good news is that I’ve documented how to do it.

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