Does the speed in which you enter a character really affect your score? The thing is my mouse is pretty... well, non-responsive so at times my speed is slow just because I have to be careful where the silly thing has flipped itself to before I click... and sometimes when I click and drag it goes berserk and flies around the screen which, of course, messes up skritter's recognition.

I was just curious if this is really affecting my 'rate' or not...

I suppose it's time to invest in a newer/better mouse. ;)

Or a Bamboo Pen or Pen & Touch... :-)

Haha. I do all my real work with a good old pencil and paper... but I like to come on skritter, especially when I'm learning new characters. :)

No, the speed of entry doesn't currently affect your score. I was toying with the idea of making extremely fast responses automatically mark a word as a four (for writing and Chinese reading prompts, anyway), but I haven't sussed out opinions on that.

@ Nick - Consider this one vote against that idea. The current setup is fine. If you make it that way, I would have to spend even more time monkeying how Skritter deals with my results. I already often have to change the grade.

Oh good! I thought I'd read somewhere that how fast we respond affects our 'score' - so to speak. I must have misread - thank goodness! I do like to take my time... haha.

Interesting idea, I would suspect that ranking the word based on how long it takes me to answer the question would be a more reliable indicator than my self ranking/rating (:

I agree with xkfowboa- except for new words. Sometimes I will stop and spend 10 or 15 minutes thinking of mnemonics for new words.

I wish their was a way to tell Skritter hold of on teaching new Kanji (that contain primitives I don't know) until I have learned it's primitives. I currently make lists of primitives I need to study. Then I stop studying the main list while I focus on the primitives. Sometimes I go a long time without studying my main list. I wish I could Study it with the primitives I want to add, but without the the Kanji made of those primitives.

Although the basic idea of saying the faster you are able to recall a character (correctly) the better it is know does make sense...but to let that effect the grading is probably a bit treacherous...for one I'm not sure how you would want to calculate the time /speed. I doubt the relation between recall speed and how well you know a character is proportional. I could also imagine that certain significant time threshholds learning wise can't be measured with skritter (different internet connection speed etc.). That is of course all quite high level stuff...there are also some really simple reasons why "speed rating" would be a problem...for one...different characters have different amount of strokes and thus take longer. Some have boxes where the "ground" you need to cover for the same amount of strokes takes longer than with a character where all strokes are bunched together. Different input methods also effect input speed very much. Most importantly, however, might well be that some people like to analyse the character more deeply...

The idea might be worth keeping in the back of the mind if you adapt a bonus system saying that really fast writing speed can give you a bonus (although a 3 to a 4 seems a bit steep), but slow input doesn't effect the grading in any way.

百发没中 you made a lot of good points. Maybe instead of timing all of the characters against the same arbitrary speed, Skritter could calculate the average time for each character and the tell the user.
For Example: (Skritter tells the user) You wrote that character 5% faster than the average Skritter user. Or create a graph that shows your average speed for writing characters v.s. other users. While nice to have, I'm not sure how useful knowing this would be.

But then you have average speed with a tablet, v users with a mouse. Separate settings for that too? I really don't think it's a big thing. I'm with west316 on this one, it's fine as it is.

Actually, I'd be more interested in having Skritter automatically downgrade from a '3' to '2' than upgrade from a '3' to '4'. It could assign a '2' rather than a '3' whenever it gives a "hint" (i.e. shows the next stroke) and you then successfully complete the character.