I’ve been using the cram tool from time to time and I really like it because it will just throw random exercises at me. That being said, I feel like it would be nice if we were able to accrue XP from our cram reviews. This could inflate XP amounts if people wanted to farm it, I suppose. But I think it would just be a nice way to reward people for additional studying.
Thoughts?
Maybe a separate type of XP, like ‘participation points’ or something. Not to belittle it, I just mean something more informal, like, you’re working out at a gym and you make a little chalk mark on a board every day you go to work out. It’s not ‘official’, except to you personally. Just a brainstorm.
Oh! Or – and perhaps much easier for the devs to add, since they have a couple existing things like it already – maybe something like a Days Crammed, to go with Days Studied, or Cram Streak.
I like both of those ideas!
It really depends on what the devs believe the role of cram is. If it’s on par with your daily reviews, then XP is fine. But if they want the XP to be only accrued from daily reviews, then something parallel to XP like your streak idea or Cram XP might be the way to go.
Either way, I think it would be cool to have some visual satisfaction from completing reviews. I mean, I do them regardless, but the gamification would be nice.
Edit: Thinking about this a little more. I think my favorite solution would be accruing XP at a reduced rate, like 50%. So a normal daily review gives 10XP for getting it right while a cram review would give 5 perhaps.
I think the only ‘tricky’ thing about XP is that it’s currently working like a ‘finite’ resource. You get to a certain SRS level on a certain grammar point, you get a certain amount of XP – let’s call it X. If you Reset that grammar point back to SRS level 0, you lose X points of XP. If you get it back to the same SRS level again in the future, you get back those X points. So, XP marks a certain ‘level’ of advancement through BunPro’s grammar and vocab items.
But cramming could be done as much as one wanted to, so if you simply gain XP every time you cram, then it’s like generating XP out of nothing, making it an ‘infinite’ resource, and thus less valuable. Someone could cram for weeks on the same N5 grammar points and even at 50% value could earn more XP than someone who has actually advanced through several new grammar points.
If cramming were to be able to ‘earn’ XP, it would have to also be a finite/limited resource.
Well, here’s a possible idea. Just brainstorming again. Suppose that each grammar point had a secondary ‘cramming level’, to supplement the main SRS level.
Then, you could cram, say 5 times, and gain 5 levels of Cram-XP, say, up to 50XP total. Once you’ve done the max, you don’t gain anymore Cram-XP for that grammar point.
Now, as that brainstorm stands, it would basically just be a kind of ‘parallel XP system’. Might be a lot of extra work for not much benefit? And it doesn’t really seem to work the way you seem to want it to work, where you would get cram XP for every day you cram.
So, what about if these ‘cram levels’ were only temporary. In the simplest case, you could just have a single cram-level: Have you crammed this point recently or not?
Suppose the ‘recent’ threshold is like one month or something. So, you cram item A on the 1st of the month, item B on the 8th, and item C on the 21st. You’ve gained +3 Cram-XP. The next month rolls around, and on the 1st of the new month, item A’s cram-level goes down one to 0, so you lose that Cram-XP, and you’re down to 2 Cram-XP. You cram A again on the 5th, and cram B also on the 6th (renewing it’s expiry date to the next-next month’s 6th). You’re back up to 3 cram-XP. The 8th rolls past, and since you re-crammed B it doesn’t expire. But the 21st rolls past and your C cram expires, and you’re back down to 2 cram-XP.
So, it would basically be like ‘keeping up your ‘fitness’ level’. Try to maintain 50 cram-XP over the course of a few months. Or, you could go for stretch goals: Try to cram as many different items in a month, maybe a couple hundred or maybe much more.
Or, if you can have multiple cram-levels per item (like SRS levels, but they expire), then you could go for ‘focused training’, try to get certain N4 grammar points to cram-level 6 for a whole month. Maybe higher cram-levels expire faster, so it’s harder to maintain them at a high level.
Basically, could have a quite flexible system with many different ways of using it, but still maintaining the idea that XP is a limited/finite resource that can’t just be gained every day forever.
And, if the cram-levels are made to work as described, then you ‘cram XP’ could simply be normal XP, but the cram-levels expire, automatically deducting their associated XP bonuses.
(Then again, if it was normal XP that frequently expired, might end up with weird behaviour like gaining a level one day, losing that level the next, regaining and relosing it over and over, depending on how much you cram/don’t cram. 
)
Wow, I didn’t know that about XP on Bunpro. I’ve been using it all this time but just assumed it was like other platforms where it was infinite. But I found an FAQ that goes over how it’s accrued.
So yeah, I’m now more firmly in your camp that the XP should be kept separate and some other metric added. Even a cram streak or a cram level would be a fun gamification encouraging additional reviews.
There is a certain reward about Cram that it seems to me that you haven’t stumbled across!
That said, our general philosophy for Cram is to provide a safe space for you to practice without affecting your main reviews or feeling dejected from a wrong answer.
What other things do you think you might find rewarding other than XP?
I like @wct 's idea for Cram Streak!
One more reward which I think would be cool is badges for cram. I understand there are badges for how many times you cram, but the number of reviews you’re doing using cram I think is the important part. You can do 100 reviews per cram, or you can do 1, so getting badges for reviews using cram instead of cram sessions seems better…
And then I’m not sure about this other reward for cramming if we’re not talking about badges, but I hope to find out soon 
actually came to forum to make my own request about the cram page, so I’ll just piggyback it on here 
it would be nice if the top menu selections were “sticky” (just write to session would suffice) so every time I go back to the page, I don’t have to reset from N5 - All Grammar. I don’t think it needs any sort of profile setting; just remember what you set last time
small nice to have, is all
Ah, that makes sense to me. Just like you get badges for number of ghosts banished, etc. Nice idea!
Nice idea! This could be pretty easily implementable locally on the browser, and not attached to the user account.
We’ll keep this idea as a ticket internally. Thanks for the feedback!