Is it necessary to always complete Final Drill
Question
I sometimes don't bother to complete the final drill, and I am wondering whether it is still necessary to complete it. I have seen seemingly contradictory statements about this on the main SuperMemo website. Please could you provide a definitive answer?
Short Answer
Do Final Drill ONLY if you have nothing else to do. Even memorizing new items can make more sense (unless you have serious problems with forgetting, e.g. when learning difficult material, such as Kanji, or so)
Answer
If you have outstanding material in the queue, do not do final drill. Final drill can speed up memorizing vocabulary (or other items), but it is more economical to learn new material in the meantime instead (due to the spacing effect).
Final drill is an accessory tool that must always be considered lower priority than reviewing the outstanding material. For that reason, in a heavily overloaded incremental reading process you may come to a point where your learning session always ends with Postpone. If this is the case, building the final drill queue makes little sense.
Option: Skip Final Drill
Question
Checking the Skip Final Drill under Options : Learning may be a good idea for those users who do have a heavily overloaded learning process. Is this correct?
Answer
Yes. This option was introduced along incremental reading with other tools for handling overload.
Contradition in the documentation
I had seen *slightly* contradictory statements on the SM website - your answer above actually seems *slightly* at odds with the older link that you have provided here, BUT, I have now found the other more recent link on the SM website, and this seems more in tune with your answer above
1998
It sounds like the contradiction comes from the fact that in SuperMemo 98 there was no incremental reading, no material overload, no Postpone, etc. In other words, it was far less intense SuperMemo with extra time to spare for final drill (good for drilling vocabulary, but not for massive learning)