Studying

A study session is where the actual learning happens. You go through cards from the Playlist, recall the back from the front (or front from the back, optionally), and tell the app whether you got it right or wrong. The app uses that feedback to schedule when each card comes back.

This page covers what happens inside a study session and the controls that shape it. The Playlist page covers what’s in the queue before you press play; this page picks up from the moment you tap PLAY.

The session flow

When you tap the play button at the bottom of the Playlist, you land on the study session summary. This is the hub you’ll come back to between every batch.

A session is broken into batches of cards (5 by default). You don’t go through the whole Playlist in one giant run — you go a batch at a time, with a pause at the summary in between.

The loop looks like this:

  1. Summary — see what’s coming. Cards are listed with their content redacted. Tap START when ready.
  2. Batch — work through 5 cards (front, then back if “test both sides” is on for the deck).
  3. Back to summary — the cards you just studied are now revealed, each marked with a checkmark (right) or X (wrong). Decide whether to keep going.
  4. Repeat. When you’ve cleared everything in the Playlist, the session is done.

The START button changes to NEXT once you’ve reviewed at least one card.

To leave the session, tap the close button in the top-left of the summary. Once you’ve reviewed at least one card, an END button also appears at the bottom next to NEXT — it does the same thing as the close button, just placed where your thumb already is. Either way, your progress for this session is preserved and the cards you already evaluated have already been scheduled, so leaving early is fine.

Inside a batch

Within a batch of 5 cards, the app goes front-side first across all 5, then back-side across all 5 (if “test both sides” is enabled). So it’s not “card 1 front and back, then card 2 front and back” — it’s “all 5 fronts, then all 5 backs.” This spaces out each card’s two halves enough to make recall feel like recall, not echo.

For each card:

Be honest with yourself here — the schedule the app builds for you is only as good as the evaluations you give it.

New-card previews

A card you’ve never seen before can’t really be tested — there’s nothing to recall yet. The first time a new card appears in a batch, the app uses a Preview UI instead of the right/wrong UI:

The same card then reappears later in the same batch — this time as a normal test — so the preview has a chance to stick first. (In Fresh Cards 2 there was no Preview step; new cards used the same UI as everything else, so people would mark a brand-new card “wrong” simply because they’d never seen it.)

Wrong-cards review

If you marked any cards wrong in the batch you just finished, an “X wrong” label appears above the START/NEXT button on the summary (where X is the count). Next to it is a refresh button. Tap it to re-study just the wrong ones as their own batch.

This is optional. The app does not silently tack wrong cards onto your next batch — that’s a behavior change from the older versions of Fresh Cards. You decide whether to chase your misses immediately, let them ride until the end of the session, or come back to them later (the Weakest filter in the Playlist surfaces wrong + still-learning cards; see Playlist › the filter button).

Shuffling

By default the app studies cards in the order they appear in the Playlist. Two controls change that:

Both are togglable any time. Turn it on, see how it feels, turn it off if you don’t like it.

Settings inside a session

The gear button on the study session summary opens the study session settings for the current deck. The settings you’ll change most often:

Side Challenges mix in active recall without changing the underlying card data.

Text Input and Word Jumble both have requirements on the card contents to be eligible (full details will be added to this doc later):

If you’ve turned on Text Input or Word Jumble for a side but the card doesn’t meet the requirements, the app falls back to Flip Card for that card. You won’t get stuck on a challenge that can’t be presented.

If more than one option is checked for a side, the app picks one at random for each presentation (using a weighting system — full details later). The one exception: a new card is always shown with Flip Card first, so you have a chance to learn it before being challenged on it.

Study UI controls

While a card is showing, the Study UI has a few common controls available on both platforms, laid out in the corners of the screen:

Mac keyboard shortcuts

On Mac, the Study UI is fully keyboard-driven. You don’t need to enable manual scoring to access the 1–5 keys — they always work.

Study UI Settings

The study session settings above (gear button on the summary) configure how the session runs. There’s a second, separate settings screen — the Study UI Settings — that configures how the card view itself behaves while you’re studying. It’s a different screen, easy to mix up by name, so:

iOS: while a card is showing, tap the ellipsis (…) button. You get a small menu with a Star / Unstar option and a Settings option. Tap Settings to open Study UI Settings.

Mac: while a card is showing, click the sliders icon (three small vertical sliders) in the Study UI. It opens Study UI Settings directly.

What you can configure here:

Grading

Behind the scenes, every card you study is given a grade from 1.0 to 5.0:

The grade is what the spaced-repetition algorithm actually uses to decide when a card comes back.

The grade itself is not shown anywhere in the app. There’s no per-card score readout in the Playlist, the card editor, or stats — if you’re looking for “what did I score on this card?”, that information isn’t surfaced. You only ever see right/wrong (or the manual 1–5 buttons if you’ve enabled them). The grade does its work behind the scenes by shaping each card’s next-due date.

How the app grades you automatically

In the default right/wrong flow, you don’t pick the grade yourself — the app assigns one based on two signals:

The short version:

So the right/wrong buttons feel binary, but the grade you produce is more nuanced than that — which is why the app can still distinguish “knew it instantly” from “barely got it” without asking you to grade by hand.

Manual score buttons

If you’d rather grade by hand, turn on Manual score buttons in Study UI Settings. The right/wrong pair is replaced by a 1–5 score picker, and you assign the grade yourself.

Manual scoring is the only way to give a card a 1.0 — the auto-grader doesn’t go below 2.0. Use it when you want finer control, or when “wrong” doesn’t fully capture how lost you were.

Right/wrong is the right default for most people. Manual scoring is there if you prefer Anki-style grading.

The spaced-repetition algorithm

How right/wrong (and the grade behind it) translate into when a card comes back is covered on its own page — see The Spaced-Repetition Algorithm.