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- 55%...no....56%....no.....55%…
55%...no....56%....no.....55%....
Re-golded all my French skills yesterday and lost fluency.
Makes perfect sense to me.
20 Comments
I do ignore it, but I still find it amusing. I'm one of those people who love metrics to measure my "state." I won't say "progress" because clearly it measures nothing (for example, I am pretty much conversationally fluent in Spanish in real life, much less so in French yet I'm 20 points better on the latter in Duo.)
It seems to me that Duo likes to mess with motivators, yet in order for a motivator to be effective, it has to be believable. Which this one is humorously not.
I've discussed somewhat with moderators of Duolingo what it is they really seek to accomplish. There does seem to be a push for a linguistically pure understanding of French language. But I do wonder what all the sudden drop in standings is all about. Hey, I pass all the skill tests, get my 5/5 for that week, then maybe wait a few days before returning to Duolingo exercises, then upon my return, see that my standings have dropped below 5/5, and I need refreshing again? In just a few days, not even a week? In a few days, I'm not as fluent as I was those few days ago? Sheesh, does that mean I don't have as much linguistic purity either? WHOA! Somebody stop this merry-go-round with the flux in standings.
This aspect of Duo is really irritating to me. I understand the idea of motivating people by "golding" skills, and then having them "ungold" for the purpose of driving continuing practice. But....I have always found it silly that I can go in and do an exceptional job on one of the easy skills, only to find it in need of practice again, the next day. I'm now 349 days into French, I've redone the tree twice, and to me it's preposterous to have to go back to Phrases 1 and re-train. For metrics to work, they have to be believable, consistent and clear in their purpose. None of Duo's motivational methods work once you've completed the tree. For me anyway.
Yep, I have not found an acceptable explanation on the forums or by any moderators for why so SUDDEN of a change in standing on exercises once you've aced them. Hey, what if after you aced an exam in some class, the instructor came back within a day or two and said, "I've dropped your score 15 points so you can be motivated to study harder." How is backtracking my score going to motivate me to try harder? And then just to have the instructor backtrack me again on the NEXT exam???
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52% fluency... I take a TIMED re-golding test and get 100% (all 20 answers) right, and back to the home screen and I am 51%!!! Go figure. I feel your pain. It is hard not to take notice of it and want to improve it but I am trying to ignore it like the others on this discussion recommend. You would think that the algorithm would be showing you mastery of the DL material in that language but I can't explain why my example would happen if that was indeed the case.
Others on Duolingo discussion forums are discussing this, some even more critically. Check out the following link: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8726201