In November, I noticed changes in my priority rankings that I thought were the result of a bug. After doing some digging, I learned the true cause was an update to 7Sage’s recommendations engine.

Since the update, the priority tags have become much less useful to me. A comment I found by a 7Sage employee about the update says the following:

“Why we changed it: Under the old system, if you set a high goal score, nearly everything showed as 'highest priority' (not helpful). If you set a lower goal score, everything showed as 'lowest priority' (also not helpful). Now you'll always see a clear spread of priorities regardless of your goal score setting.”

If this is the reason for the change, it seems to have had the opposite of its intended effect on me. My goal score is 180, and my performance across question types is high. Prior to the update, my priorities were spread out in a reasonable and actionable manner. After the update, all except one of my RC tags were ranked “highest priority.” Here is screenshot from the bottom of my RC priorities list:

It seems obvious to me that a question type that, on average, appears less than once per test that I have never answered incorrectly should not be ranked "highest priority"!

This problem occurs at the top of my RC priority list, too!

(Note "Miscellany" and "Logical continuation.")

To a lesser, but still significant, degree my LR priorities have also been adversely affected.

A few examples:

On all of these question types, I am above goal accuracy, but they are still labled "high priority"!

I don’t have screenshots of my priorities from before the update (I had no reason to take any at the time), but I assure you they were much more reasonably spread out.

I would like to request that either another change be made to the recommendations engine or that users be given the option to switch to the engine’s pre-November version.

I realize that I may be an edge case, and it could be argued that since I am at or above my goal accuracy for most question types, my priority tags could not be relied on to guide study regardless of the engine’s tuning. This may be true, but if my priorities must be heavily weighted towards one extreme or the other, I would prefer to see most question types labled as “lowest” rather than “highest” priority. That is closer to how they appeared before the update and would better reflect my progress towards my goals. As they are now, they inaccurately suggest I have a massive amount of unfeasible progress to make.