To make the Easy button behave like the Good button, set the Easy Interval to match your Graduation Interval and change the Easy Bonus to 1.00. This prevents the Ease factor from inflating, a common issue in scheduling algorithms discussed by Computational Complexity. StudyCards AI automates card creation to reduce this manual tuning.
You can make the Easy button behave like the Good button by modifying your deck options to remove the bonus multiplier and aligning the initial intervals. This change ensures that clicking Easy does not push a card too far into the future or artificially inflate its Ease factor, which often leads to long term retention failure.
By default, the Easy button is designed to accelerate a card's journey out of the learning phase and into the review phase. While this sounds helpful, it creates a mathematical trap. When you press Easy on a review card, Anki does not just increase the interval (the time until you see the card again), it also increases the Ease factor itself.
The Ease factor is the multiplier used to calculate every future interval. If your Ease factor is 250%, Anki multiplies the current interval by 2.5. When you hit Easy, the Easy Bonus (defaulting to 1.3) increases that 250% to something higher. Over time, this creates a snowball effect where the intervals grow so large that you forget the material before the card ever reappears. This is why many users prefer the Anki workflow based on active recall rather than relying on default button behaviors.
This type of logic is fundamentally different from other types of scheduling. For example, Stanford University's research on OS scheduling focuses on resource allocation and time slices to ensure fairness among processes. In contrast, Anki's scheduling is about managing the decay of human memory, where "fairness" is replaced by the goal of maximum retention with minimum effort.
To force the Easy button to mirror the Good button, you must enter the deck options for your specific deck. Follow these steps exactly.
By setting the Easy Bonus to 1.00, you are telling Anki to multiply the Ease factor by one (which does nothing). This effectively kills the inflation mechanism. Now, when you press Easy, the card will move forward in time, but it will not become "easier" for the rest of its life. For those who want a more modern approach, exploring Anki FSRS may be a better alternative as it handles these calculations automatically using machine learning.
To understand why these changes work, you have to look at the SM-2 algorithm that powers traditional Anki scheduling. The core formula for a review card is: New Interval = Previous Interval * Ease Factor.
Let's look at a concrete example of how this works with default settings versus your new custom settings. Imagine you have a card with an interval of 10 days and an Ease factor of 250% (2.5).
Scenario A: Default Settings
Scenario B: Custom Settings (Easy Bonus = 1.0)
The difference of 18 days in a single step may seem small, but over five or six repetitions, the default "Easy" button can push a card out to several years, while the custom setting keeps it within a manageable range. This mathematical precision is why technical optimization for med school focuses so heavily on these specific multipliers.
There is a major distinction between how the Easy button works during the learning phase and the review phase. When a card is "learning", it has not yet graduated to become a review card. It follows your Learning Steps (e.g., 1m 10m).
In the learning phase, hitting Good moves you to the next step in the sequence. Hitting Easy bypasses all remaining steps and sends the card straight to the review queue with an interval equal to the Easy Interval. If your Graduation Interval is 1 day and your Easy Interval is 4 days (the default), clicking Easy skips the "Good" graduation process entirely.
By aligning these two values, you ensure that no matter which button you press for a successful answer, the card enters the review queue at the same time. This removes the temptation to click Easy just to get rid of a card, as there is no longer a "shortcut" out of the learning phase. This disciplined approach to scheduling is similar to how professional booking systems like TidyCal prioritize simplicity and consistency over complex, multi-layered setup screens that can lead to errors.
For those who are in a time crunch, you might be tempted to use cramming settings, but for long term mastery, keeping the learning and easy intervals aligned is the safer bet.
Not every student needs to make Easy behave like Good. The necessity depends on your volume of cards and the nature of the material.
Medical students often deal with 20,000 to 50,000 cards. In this environment, a few "Easy" clicks can lead to a massive gap in knowledge. If a card about a rare pathology is pushed to 3 years because of an inflated Ease factor, the student will likely forget it before the exam. For this user, making Easy behave like Good is mandatory. It provides a safety net that prevents cards from disappearing into the void. This is a core part of strategic Anki use for med school.
Language learners often have a different problem. They deal with high volumes of simple vocabulary and a few very difficult grammar points. For them, the Easy button can actually be useful for common words (like "the" or "and") that they already know from other languages. However, if they find themselves in "Ease Hell", where cards they *should* know are appearing too often because they hit Wrong once, then adjusting these settings helps stabilize the deck.
Someone studying for a CPA or Bar exam has a fixed date. Their scheduling needs to be aggressive but predictable. By neutralizing the Easy button, they can ensure their review load is distributed evenly across the months leading up to the test, rather than having huge clusters of cards reappear all at once because several "Easy" intervals expired on the same day.
Even after changing these settings, you might find your workload is still unbalanced. If cards feel too frequent, do not simply hit Easy more often. Instead, look at your Graduation Interval.
If you are consistently hitting Good and the card returns the next day, but you feel you know it well, increase the Graduation Interval to 2 or 3 days. This shifts the entire curve forward without risking the Ease inflation that comes with the Easy button. You can find more on this in the complete optimization guide.
Another common issue is the "Ease Hell" loop. This happens when you hit Wrong on a card that had a very high Ease factor. Anki drops the Ease factor significantly, and suddenly you are seeing the card every few days for months. The only way to fix this in traditional SM-2 is to manually reset the card's ease or use an add-on. This is why many users seek out the best Anki add-ons to manage their deck health.
Scheduling tasks in software, whether it is a complex memory algorithm or a simple scheduled SMS message, always relies on the balance between frequency and relevance. If you schedule too often, it is noise; if you schedule too rarely, it is forgotten.
The most difficult part of Anki is not the scheduling, but the card creation. Spending hours manually typing cards often leads to burnout before you even reach the review phase. StudyCards AI solves this by converting your PDFs and notes into high quality flashcards instantly. By automating the input, you can spend your mental energy on actually studying and fine tuning your intervals rather than fighting with a text editor.
"I used to spend my entire Sunday making cards for the upcoming week of med school. Now I just upload my lecture slides to StudyCards AI and export them to Anki. It gave me back ten hours a week, which I now use to actually do my reviews."
- Sarah K., Second Year Medical Student
Yes, the Easy Bonus change affects all future presses of the Easy button for all cards in that deck. However, it does not retroactively change the intervals of cards already scheduled.
The only downside is that you lose the ability to quickly push very simple cards far into the future. You will see "easy" cards more often than you would with default settings.
Ease Hell occurs when a card's Ease factor becomes too low, causing it to appear too frequently, or too high, causing it to disappear until you forget it.
For most users, yes. FSRS is a newer algorithm that calculates intervals based on your actual performance rather than fixed multipliers.
You can use the "Set Due Date" feature or certain add-ons to manually adjust the ease factor of individual cards.
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