org-drill isn't letting me drill

Question

I'm studying for finals and want to use org-drill . Org-drill sees my flash cards and places UUIDs in properties drawers (see the code snippet below). However, when I call org-drill-cram, it says it doesn't see anything:

I did not find any pending drill items.

Here is a screenshot showing what org-drill reports:

Below is an example of one of my cards.

*** What is the key syntax for proc freq? :drill:
:PROPERTIES:
:ID:       34885705-f0ae-431f-baf6-50f8c5689cb1
:END:

**** the answer

#+BEGIN_SRC SAS
  proc freq data=data;
      tables vars / options;
      output out=out_data;
  run;
#+END_SRC

How do I get org-drill and org-drill-cram to actually test me on my flash cards? It looks like they are detected (since properties are added). What am I missing? I'm using Org 8.2.10 from MELPA and Emacs 24.4.

Answer 1

From the org-drill manual on "Empty Cards":

If you have an item with an empty body, but still want it to be included in a drill session, put a brief comment ('# …') in the item body.

I think org-drill is seeing your card as empty, and so org-drill-cram fails to retrieve your items. By comparison, the cards in spanish.org are not empty.

This is non-intuitive behavior because one expects comments to be meaningless, but here they are necessary.

I ran into this problem myself when setting up similar reviews where I felt the title was a sufficient prompt, and it took a while to identify this as the cause. My previous incorrect hypothesis was that I hadn't added the file to the agenda and org-drill-scope wasn't set properly.

It might be possible to modify the org-drill code to avoid this behavior, but I have not done so.

On an unrelated note, you might also find the setting org-drill-cram-hours useful.