Guides and this page

For learners

How studying works

Answer before you reveal the card, grade what actually happened, and let keep club choose when the card returns. Progress comes from earning longer spacing, not from answering as many cards as possible.

Choose the right grade Understand exam mode

Do today’s plan

Study serves due cards, cards still being learned, and today’s new cards. The repeat limit can leave a backlog; a section can also offer clearly labelled extra new cards.

Grade the answer

Hard means correct but slow. If the answer was wrong or missing, choose Again—even when it felt close.

Trust the shown gap

The day count behind a grade-button label is rolled once and then recorded. Labels under a month show the exact days; month and year labels are rounded summaries. Practice buttons show no interval.

What to do each day

Open Study. The main button contains the cards in today’s plan. A repeat limit can leave due cards out of today’s recorded Study.
Try to recall first. Say or form the answer before showing the back. Recognition after revealing is not recall.
Choose the honest grade. Use the definitions below, rather than choosing whichever return date looks convenient.
Stop when the session finishes. When recorded Study has nothing left to serve after today’s limits, keep club may offer Practice Ahead. Practice is optional and does not alter the plan.

You can undo the last recorded answer with the on-screen Undo control or the U key. On a keyboard, Space reveals, and 1–4 choose Again, Hard, Good, and Easy.

Again, Hard, Good, and Easy

Judge whether the answer was correct first. Speed and effort decide between the three correct grades.

Grade	Use it when	What happens
Again	The answer was wrong, missing, or only became clear after you revealed it.	The card returns later in this session. If it had already left the learning loop, keep club retains roughly 40% of its ordinary spacing instead of erasing all prior learning.
Hard	The answer was correct, but slow or effortful.	After the learning loop, the shown gap is held rather than increased, and later gaps grow more cautiously.
Good	The answer was correct without serious difficulty.	In ordinary reviews, the gap grows based on how readily you have recalled the card before.
Easy	The answer was immediate and obvious.	In ordinary reviews, the gap normally grows more than Good, and later gaps can grow a little faster.

Hard is still a correct answer. If you were wrong but close, use Again. Keep club counts Hard, Good, and Easy as successful repeat answers.

Learning and relearning are different: Good and Easy can graduate to the same retained gap, and Easy does not always mean a longer date there. Grade the recall, not the label.

Learning and relearning

In recorded Study, new and missed cards use positions in the current session, not minute timers. Again normally puts a card behind about four other cards; Hard puts it behind about eight. A short queue can bring it back sooner.

Again keeps a learning card in the session.
A new card can stay in the learning loop on Hard twice; its third Hard moves it into ordinary reviews at about one day.
A missed review card enters relearning one step later. If it is not missed again, one Hard keeps it in the loop and a second moves it back to roughly the ordinary spacing retained when it was missed.
Another Again during relearning resets that step. From the reset, three Hards are needed to leave the loop; Good or Easy can leave it immediately at roughly the retained spacing.
Good normally moves a new card into ordinary reviews at about one day.
Easy normally moves a new card into ordinary reviews at about four days.
After Again on a card already in ordinary reviews, relearning starts from the retained roughly 40% spacing rather than from nothing.

A card already in ordinary reviews does not return within minutes after Hard. It returns after the interval printed on its button.

Daily limits and extra cards

New cards in the daily plan controls the automatic course-wide plan. It is not a universal hard maximum:

Near a future exam, any non-zero number becomes a minimum that keep club may raise. Setting it to zero always pauses unseen cards.
When unseen cards are enabled, if recorded Study has nothing left to serve in a section after the daily limits, opening that section may start up to 20 extra unseen cards. Due repeats can still be waiting outside a spent repeat limit. The extra cards are real study: their answers are recorded, and the app labels them before the first question.

Most cards to repeat in one day is a real limit for the ordinary Study queue. Due repeats beyond it are left out of today’s recorded Study and normally remain due; a temporary exam pull-forward can expire when the exam date arrives. Opening a particular section does not remove the course-wide limit.

Studying for an exam

A future exam date changes both introductions and reviews. It is an exam-planning layer over the ordinary scheduler, not a separate measure of what you know.

New cards

Keep club tries to introduce all unseen cards within the first 60% of the remaining time, leaving roughly 40% for repeats. Your non-zero daily number is the minimum; the app raises it when the deck otherwise would not fit. Zero remains an absolute pause.

Reviews

For a review answered while an exam is active, the longest experienced gap is about one fifth of the whole days left on that answer date: answering with 30 days remaining gives a ceiling of about 6 days; 10 days gives about 2 days. The minimum is one day.

Turning on or changing an exam also projects existing schedules from the date each current interval was originally earned—not from the day you change the setting. That projection only pulls a review earlier. It can make an older card due immediately, but it never postpones one.

The exam date and the dates printed on your grade buttons make cards due earlier. Your daily repeat limit still decides how many the ordinary Study queue actually serves, so a large backlog is not a guarantee that every due card will be shown before the exam.

Why a solid card can be due soon

Keep club keeps two different facts:

ordinary spacing—the next interval calculated from your answer without the exam pull-forward; and
experienced due date—when exam mode asks you to see the card sooner.

A card can therefore have 30 days of ordinary spacing, remain solid, and still be due in 6 days for the exam. Clearing the exam date exposes the unchanged ordinary schedule again. If you explicitly grade that early review Hard, however, the short gap remains: Hard is a real answer, not merely an exam setting.

An exam date of today or in the past does not cap newly calculated spacing. Normal spacing is active on and after the date. One exception keeps a promise already shown: if you reveal a grade button before midnight and press it after the exam day begins, the printed interval is still the one recorded.

How progress is counted

Keep club uses one progress vocabulary:

Not started: no recorded answer yet.
Learning: still in the session learning loop.
Bedding in: reviewing, but ordinary spacing is under 21 days.
Solid: the card is in ordinary reviews and its ordinary spacing has reached at least 21 days.

Solid describes earned future spacing. It does not mean you have already waited three weeks and recalled the card again. Exam mode may make a solid card due sooner without removing its ordinary spacing.

Learning takes priority over the spacing label. If a solid card is answered Again, it temporarily counts as learning—even when the 40% retained spacing is still at least 21 days. It can count as solid again after it leaves relearning.

Progress is the percentage of cards that are solid. Merely seeing a card receives no half-credit, so a fully seen deck can honestly show 0% solid while every card is still bedding in. Again on an ordinary review card can lower its retained spacing below 21 days and reduce progress.

Why an old 50% can become 0%

Before the August 2026 repair, Home gave every seen-but-not-solid card half-credit. Once every card had been seen, that display rule manufactured exactly 50% even when none had earned three-week spacing. It was a progress-display bug, not an expected learning plateau and not standard Anki behavior.

The repair removes that fake half-credit; it does not delete your answers. Any surviving ordinary spacing still counts. A course can therefore move from the old 50% to an honest 0%, then climb as Good and Easy answers earn longer spacing.

Used keep club before the August 2026 progress repair? Older exam scheduling could overwrite a longer interval. The app keeps the evidence that survived; it does not invent three-week spacing from repetition totals. Future Good and Easy reviews can rebuild solid progress.

Practice Ahead

Practice Ahead appears when recorded Study has nothing left to serve after the daily limits. A spent repeat limit can therefore expose Practice even while due cards remain. Practice includes every learning and due card in its scope, then can add up to 20 of the soonest future reviews and, when new cards are enabled, up to 20 unseen cards. A large due backlog can therefore make a practice round longer than 40 cards.

Practice does not change due dates, intervals, solid progress, daily totals, streaks, achievements, or whether an unseen card counts as started. Every grade runs on a temporary copy. The opening message, grade buttons, and completion screen all say when a session is practice.

Use it for optional rehearsal. If you want an answer to influence the scheduler, wait until the card appears in ordinary Study.

Practice also forgets its temporary learning steps. Again can keep returning a card, and Hard on an unseen practice card does not use the three-Hard escape described for recorded Study. Leave the round when repeating it is no longer useful.

Cards missed repeatedly

A card is marked missed 3+ times after three Again answers on ordinary reviews. This is a cumulative history flag, not a claim that the card is currently weak. It remains after later Good or Easy answers and after the card becomes solid.

Use the filter as a reading list: check the source, rewrite an ambiguous card, or add a note when the underlying idea still causes trouble.

Small scheduling details

Why intervals vary slightly

Intervals of at least three days are spread by about 5%. The possible range extends at least one day in each direction, although the random roll can still land on the original day. This prevents many cards from piling onto one date. The exact day count behind the button label is rolled once and recorded, even if you reload or cross midnight before pressing it; month and year labels only summarize that count. Hard on an ordinary review is not spread, because repeatedly holding a card should not random-walk. A Hard that finishes relearning can still receive the normal small spread.

Is this the standard Anki scheduler?

No. Keep club currently uses a simplified SM-2-inspired scheduler with its own Hard, Again, session-learning, and exam rules. It does not use modern Anki’s FSRS scheduler. Importing an Anki deck brings cards and media, not its scheduling history; imported cards start new.

Limits

Keep club bounds how quickly gaps can grow, and the longest ordinary interval is 400 days. These are global rules rather than deck options.

Where progress is kept

Progress starts in this browser profile on this device. A different browser, private profile, or cleared site-data store is a separate place.

Built-in courses can use account-free Sync. One Sync key is permission to the synced progress, notes, and cards you write in every built-in course using that key, so protect it like a password.

Imported and locally created decks do not Sync. Their backups restore only into that exact local deck while it still exists in this browser profile; a backup cannot move imported-deck review history to another browser or phone. Keep the original .apkg or course file to recreate the cards. The controls are under Settings → Keeping your progress.