Spaced repetition schedule: the flashcards timing guide from WeSolve+

The measured answer, the expanding shape, and the exam date anchor are below.

The measured optimal gap

The strongest single data point on timing comes from Cepeda and colleagues' 2008 experiment, run with Hal Pashler's group across more than a thousand learners: the best gap between two study events was roughly 10 to 20 percent of the time until the final test. A week away puts the review about a day out; a semester away stretches it toward two to four weeks. The ratio is the insight: the schedule should widen as the horizon widens.

Expanding intervals: the working shape

In practice schedulers implement the ratio as expanding steps: a new card returns within a day, then after a few days, then a week, then weeks, with each successful recall stretching the next gap and each miss shrinking it back. The old Leitner box did this with physical piles; software does it per card with less ceremony. The exact multipliers matter less than the two properties the research demands, gaps that grow on success and collapse on failure.

Anchoring the schedule to an exam date

A pure expanding schedule optimizes for forever, but terms end on a date. The adjustment is a tightening phase: as the exam approaches, the long lanes compress so that every card lands at least once in the final stretch, and new card intake freezes to keep the queue drainable. This is also where the ratio helps backwards: with three weeks left, material you want fresh should be returning on roughly two to four day gaps, not monthly ones.

Missing days: what the schedule actually forgives

Skipped days cost less than students fear, and they cost something different from what students expect. The due pile grows linearly, but your memory for each overdue card has kept fading, so the first session back runs at a higher miss rate; the fix is to drain overdue cards across two or three sessions rather than one heroic purge, letting the misses reset their own intervals. The percentages above are the cited researchers' results, not WeSolve+ review data; the app publishes none.

Setting it up from your own notes

The schedule is only half the machine; the other half is cards worth returning to. Decks built from your own chapters and photographed pages inherit your course's language, and the app's scheduler then runs the timing without sending you through a settings menu. Size the daily intake with the volume guide, and if the why behind the gaps interests you, the forgetting explainer covers the curve the schedule is fighting.

By Gökhan Ateş (Flashcards and test taking)

Last updated: 2026-08-15 · Written with AI assistance and reviewed before publishing.