Even if you're not allowed to bring it to the exam. Writing things down helps. What you want is to cram the entire course on 1 or more pages that you can in the end tile in front of you and say with high degree of confidence "This is exactly everything I must know"
Reminds me of this comedy bit in an American sitcom from about 35 years ago where the dumb kid when asked how his history test said it went okay but admitted he cheated. He explained that he tried to write down everything on his arm, there was not enough room despite multiple attempts at it. Then he realized he was starting to remember some of the content after the several rewrites, and said "so I just did it that way! I hid it all in my head and it was great! The professor didn't even know that I was cheating because there was no evidence!"
Looking back at my time at university, I have to admit that I mainly attended group study sessions in order to spend more time with the attractive singles in our course. This had the accidental benefit of forcing me to study and discuss the material more (which led to better understanding) so that I could help coach others. That in turn led to 1) a reasonable side-hustle in tutoring and 2) dating and marrying my wife.
> This had the accidental benefit of forcing me to study and discuss the material more (which led to better understanding) so that I could help coach others.
The few times when someone tried to explain things to me live, lead to my brain just kinda blanking because of the time pressure and whatnot and it wasn't very useful for me.
Instead, if I wanted to learn something properly, I'd have to just dig into the material myself and iterate on it. Consulting others worked better over text, in a group chat or forum or whatever.
I could only discuss a topic when I already had good grasp of it and felt confident about it. At that point it was more for the benefit of others, outside of finding niche cases that I didn't run into myself.
Same here. People trying to share information I have no interest in? Impossible to learn. My brain finding some interesting topic? Impossible to avoid ingesting all the knowledge about it.
Makes the first ~18 years of your life kind of difficult, as school basically is mostly the first part with not so much the second, but once you complete school or drop out to start working, being able to do the second part seems like a godsend compared to your peers.
this is disturbingly similar to the comment just above it :-). Congratulations..
If you by accident demonstrate desirable attributes or qualities while being observed by another sex, you run the risk of attracting them :-)
(apologies in advance to those who wish to attract the same sex; I assume it works there too).
Although this advice is quite comprehensive, I think it assumes that you've already kept up with the pace of the course. In some schools, the curriculum moves so fast that students are thrown into problem sets before they’ve even grasped the basics. I’d love to see how he would advise someone who's already fallen behind and trying to catch up. For many people, that’s the more realistic situation.
This advice is aimed at students who are already getting good-great grades but want to optimise further. Advice for students that get poor grades is quite different.
That being said my grades in university were middling to poor and once I got out I applied for jobs with my degree in hand and not a single one asked for my academic transcript. Perhaps more prestigious graduate positions might have, but I just didn’t apply for those. But I got various positions and my career took off just fine.
Now the idea that anyone would care about my university grades seems laughable. So, it’s important to remember that learning in university is important but if you don’t get amazing grades it’s not something people should stress about too much IMO.
Plenty of places ask for GPA for university graduates, and a low ine is disqualifying. After a few years no one will ever care again, again unless you want to go to a grad school like an MBA, where a very low GPA can again be disqualifying
maybe if you want to attend a top MBA program at some schools, but since it's intended for a diverse range of undergrad degrees and there are a million MBA programs you can find one that will let you in. They also focus on your final coursework where most people have by then learned how to get at least decent grades and your GMAT score so a couple of early bad years won't disqualify you.
>Now the idea that anyone would care about my university grades seems laughable.
Sadly, this current batch of graducates can't grab anything even with decent schools and grades. Some are putting a huge emphasis only on Tier 1 schools. Crazy how quickly everything changed.
Fascinating. I wondered if this would suggest note-taking in lectures (it doesn't). This is something I never did and then finally I bent to everyone saying it's the most important thing and I did awfully in Algebraic Geometry. I had to return to my old technique of just paying 100% attention with 0% note taking, and then creating short cheat sheets of techniques in LaTeX before the exam.
This is the first time I've come across any college advice that does not mention this and I'm glad for it. I just never got good at note-taking to be able to properly pay attention to the lecture.
I did not, it distracted me from listening. One of the key things to do was to do and not only read as many exercises as possible, including the old ones of the same professor. Then going back to reading the material once you got stuck.
Most of the time I studied with a good friend who had to go to the army and did not want to lose those years. So I prepared everything during the semester and taught it to him when he took some days off before the exams. Tough times but worked well for both of us.
A very good focus operator for exams was to ask the TA questions in the last exercises. The topics they answered quickly had a high chance of being relevant, because they had prepared them for the exams.
I find notes useful only in that they need to try to to figure out what to write next keeps me from daydreaming. I have dysgraphia so there is no hope I can read any notes latter, nor is there hope that I could possibly transcribe what is said word for words so I'm looking for the main points - which is what is most commonly recommended you write down.
I never got this idea that taking notes distracts you from listening. To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write (especially in math, where I usually rewrote some proofs on the fly so they were less ambiguous and more easy to check for correctness later).
Depends on your note-taking strategy. I would just transcribe what the professor was saying and ended up not paying attention. I turned my brain into a transcription machine and didn't take any time to grok anything I heard, then I had to re-read the textbook later. Nobody ever "taught" me how to study, so I was bad at it. Failed my way through high school and dropped out of college
I am the same way— I find note taking distracts me such that I end up missing important things, and my notes are usually worthless too. I did pretty well at school with my no-notes approach. Obviously it’s useful to write down assignments, or the occasional verbatim example from the whiteboard. But for me, notes usually hinder more than they help.
I have a tip for following lectures (or any technical talk, really) that I've been meaning to write about for a while.
As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track of how things fit into the big picture. For example in a math class, there may be a big theorem that they're working towards using lots of smaller lemmas. How will it all come together?
When you get it right, it will feel like you are figuring out the material on your own, rather than having it explained to you. This is the most important part.
If you can manage to stay one step ahead of the lecturer, it will keep you way more engaged than trying to write everything down. Writing puts you one step behind what the speaker is saying. Because of this, I usually don't take any notes at all. It obviously works better when lecture notes are made available, but you can always look at the textbook.
People often assume that I have read the material or otherwise prepared for lectures, seminars, etc., because of how closely I follow what the speaker is saying. But really most talks are quite logical, and if you stay engaged it's easy to follow along. The key is to not zone out or break your concentration, and I find this method helps me immensely.
This is fun to do during lectures but in my experience only about 5-10% of my learning happened in math class. The other 90% happened at home as I worked through the problem sets.
Essentially the lectures served as an inefficient way of delivering me a set of notes which I’d then reference during homework sessions. I could often predict what was coming next in the lecture but the really hard parts were the key parts in some technical lemmas that were necessary to complete the theorem. Learning how to figure out a key step like that had to come completely on my own (with no spoilers).
In a lot of ways, math lectures really started to turn into an experience similar to watching a Let’s Play of a favourite video game. Watching those can tell you exactly what you need to do to get past the part where you’re stuck but they don’t in general make you better at video games. For that you need to actually play them yourself.
The viewpoint of a lecture as an inefficient note delivery system is a pretty common and reductive view. Your "Let's Play" analogy was pretty apt though.
I think their (potential) value seems pretty clear when you look at language courses -- you can't possibly hope to develop fluency in a language by studying it in isolation from books -- forming your own sentences and hearing how other human beings do the same in real time is pretty decisive.
With math classes, YMMV, especially since they are rarely so interactive at the upper division and graduate level, but at the very least seeing an instructor talk about math and work through problems (and if you are lucky to have a particularly disorganized one, get stuck, and get themselves unstuck) can go a long way. But to be fair I regularly skipped math lectures in favor of reading too, heh
I rarely skipped math lectures in university (only when the prof was really bad; but then I watched video lectures taught by a different prof from a previous term).
The lectures in the hardest math classes I took did not feature any “working through problems.” They were 50 minute pedal-to-the-metal proof speedrun sessions that took me 2-3 hours of review and practice work to fully understand. I don’t know how anyone can see a lecture like that and not see it as an inefficient note delivery system.
I did have math classes where profs worked through problems but those were generally the much easier applied math classes. Those were the ones I least needed to attend lectures for because there you’re just following the steps of an algorithm rather than having to think hard about how to synthesize a proof.
For language learning it’s hard to beat full immersion. When we learn our first language (talking to our parents as children) we don’t learn it by theory (memorizing verb conjugations), we learn it by engaging the language centre in our brains. I think language classes are more useful if you want to learn to write and translate in that language, where you need a strong theoretical background. If your main goal for language learning is being able to speak with loved ones or being able to travel and speak fluently with locals, then sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture seems like a very difficult way to do that.
I consider the value in math lectures to come from the speaker’s explanation of why to expect certain things. Is this an obvious fact in another context, rewritten for this application? Is this a surprise? What reasons besides the rigorous argument are there for believing the theory?
A lot of the theorems I learned in school weren’t particularly amenable to intuitive explanations like that.
For example, take Galois theory. The fact that a polynomial’s solvability by radicals depends on the solvability of its Galois group is surprising and not intuitive at all. The fundamental theorem of Galois theory is a very technical result utilizing purpose-built mathematical structures that were developed specifically to study the solutions of polynomial equations.
I had a math professor in college that would often say to our class, "You cannot be like Michael Jordan by just watching Michael Jordan. If you want to be better at basketball, you have to practice. Math is no different." No matter how you spin it, he was correct -- unless you are like Ramanujan and a Hindu god just reveals a solution to you.
Honestly though, I believe I learn better in a similar manner to what you described. I would rather just read the textbook and learn on my own. I find that to be a far more efficient learning style for me. However, I typically always went to class for a handful of reasons:
1. To signal that I cared about the subject to the professor (whether I honestly cared or not). Though I had some classes that actually penalized a lack of attendance.
2. There is comradery in group struggle. It was nice way to meet other students that had a common goal. I made many friends during my time. Some of which I still keep in touch with a decade later. In fact, I met my SO in one of my classes -- all because we studied together.
3. The main reason being, I paid for the class, and I wanted to get my money's worth out of it. While passing the course and learning the material was the goal. I'd hate knowing I just paid to teach myself everything. I could have done that for free, so I wanted something more out of the deal.
One of thing I should add is that I am poorly disciplined and have poor executive functioning, so I probably picked up more in class that I would admit -- I didn't have a control to compare against. Still to this date, I rely heavily on solutions to the problems. Not in a way that allows me to cheat, but I would likely be unable to be certain I was teaching myself correctly if I didn't have the answers or know of a method to verify my work. I am confident that I cannot be confident in my answers to nearly anything. I am prone to too many mistakes.
If one goes far enough in math, one will encounter solutions where there are not clear answers and one must use all of their knowledge and abilities to support their answers. And that my YN friends, is why I am not a mathematician despite my love for the subject.
- I find that writing notes in class helped me learn just through the physical action of my hands. (I think there is some formal study of this as a phenomenon). I am poorly disciplined so at least getting that hour or so of writing notes is probably more than I would have managed alone.
- In class, sometimes the lecturer provides helpful intuition for something through informal speech or even intonation. For example I struggled with the concept of ergodicity from a textbook until I saw someone explain it to me like I'm 5. I find that often, textbooks are like man pages, in that they are almost afraid to provide informal/intuitive writing for fear of appearing unserious.
p.s. if ChatGPT existed 30 years ago I would have managed to learn so much more instead of spinning wheels on dry writing. ChatGPT is really good at being a "personalized manpage explainer"
Agree with this comment but follow up to this tip:
Only use this as a learning technique. Do not accidentally let this bleed over into personal 1:1 conversations.
I know some people in my life who are "smart" and they will cut people off in the middle of conversation to the effect of "oh yeah I already know what you are going to say, let me go ahead and cut you off so I can respond faster".
On top of being completely obnoxious on the face of it, they are wrong enough times in their predictions to where it completely fucks the conversation.
Incompatible communication styles (turn-taking vs. constructive overlapping) can be frustrating. Turn-takers may consider overlappers to be rude and aggressive and try to stop the overlap, which overlappers may in turn consider rude and aggressive; yet full-duplex is more efficient than half-duplex and even basic ACKs are important for reliable communication.
Unfortunately Zoom is 1/N-duplex, which ruins it for everyone.
Good point! I used to be guilty of this myself, so now I'm pretty sensitive about other people doing it. I am now one of the more senior students in an academic research group, and some of the younger members would benefit from this advice. I think it's a symptom of sophomorism, and hopefully most will grow out of it.
I agree it's especially frustrating when they don't even get it right. That crosses the line for me, and I will admonish them to let me finish what I am saying.
Well said. And it makes sense, if you define intelligence as the ability to successfully predict the future.
And how interesting that that is literally how LLMs are trained during pretraining. Like Ilya said: To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of a detective novel, you must have followed the plot, have world knowledge about physics, psychology, etc..
And that’s what you’re pointing at here. Testing yourself on the ability to predict during a lecture is like running a loss function to keep you on your toes.
Oh yea. A good detective novel gives the reader all the necessary information to know the answer. Many lousier novels just keep some essential information hidden until the monologue, because they haven’t got a tricky enough mystery, and really shitty ones just accidentally reveal it, often by over-using tropes or having silly patterns like “it’s always the dark and brooding guy”. Ever read any Dan Brown? In Angels and Demons he gives it away on the first page with an anagram.
That monologue curtain pull is a hallmark of Sherlock Holmes. I wouldn’t call Doyle’s books lousy for that though. Creating brain-teasers for the audience isn’t really the point. It’s all about a character Doyle found insufferable but the audience loved!
People who read detective novels do. Every other book the clues are not the point and so they are skipped - or more likely there is no investigation, you are just told and the plot moves on.
If that is true, which sometimes it is, you having suspected about anyone except the actual murderer, and at the same time it is totally obvious who the culprit is on a second reading, then it is a very good plot.
It meant that I understood the scaffolding of the course: the broad goals of the subject, the main ways to tackle them, what is currently being explored, and why are we going in this direction at this moment.
There was one class where this started to fail, which was a class without slides or a book. This meant that, without notes, when I recalled a proof technique but not the details, I had to resort to asking others for their notes. Because it wasn't documented anywhere else.
Which is why I hate the PowerPoint presentation-based lectures. Speaker typically goes too fast, and their brain does not actually break down the arguments into logical steps. They just read the slides.
Reading from slides is the absolute worst way of delivery anywhere, whether it’s a lecture or an internal presentation to your work team, doesn’t matter. The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles.
Chalk and board though is not necessarily the best. Power point supports magic hotkeys - B and W - and allows drawing on slides. When done properly with a stylus, it’s incrementally better in almost every way than chalk, though a proper lecture hall with multiple blackboards will still hold its own.
I slightly disagree. Specifically, in the case of academic lectures, on:
> The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles.
Especially when not taking notes, having the slides effectively be lecture notes is great to allow you to go back to the content of the lecture days or weeks later.
That does not mean that I want a lecturer to just read from the slides. But I want the slides to be more than just a visual aid for the lecture. They need to be reference material as well. This is also generally accepted, and can be considered the reason so many other presentations where this is a bad idea, still have the bad lecture-style slides. Because its what is modeled to people during their education.
Note, for presentations to stakeholders, or presentations of results, or almost any other type of professional presentation. Slides should probably be visual aids only, and not reference material. But lectures are a special case.
I strongly agree - I started teaching from slides and shifted more and more to blackboard and chalk.
I found that they can also be combined well by showing a slide that gives some guidance where "we" are in the material, supplemented by writing and drawing on the blackboard to explain one or more bullet points or statements from the slides, and to answer student questions.
This also forces students to take additional notes, which helps them per muscle memory.
"... when people converse or share an experience, their brain waves synchronize. Neurons in corresponding locations of the different brains fire at the same time, creating matching patterns ..."
"The experience of “being on the same wavelength” as another person is real, and it is visible in the activity of the brain."
"Synchrony may be a sign of shared cognitive processing ..."
"The mouse study suggested another level of meaning for synchrony: it predicts the outcomes of future interactions."
This is exactly how I read research papers and how I advocate others read them as well. As you read try to figure out how you would solve the problem outlined and what experiments you would need to perform.
That may require some experience, which you can obtain gradually by reading lots of papers, some good, some bad, to see how they do it. Eventually, you can tell if an experiment is suitable for showing strong support of the RQ or not.
(And you will also learn to read between the lines e.g. "Our resulst are PROMISING..." = there is much space for improvement etc.)
Great advice! Personally, I got immense value from writing notes but never when I wrote them during the lecture. 30 minutes after the lecture has ended is a perfect time time to sit down in the library and write notes for what the lecture was about. This gives enough time to reflect about the big picture, but not so too much time that the details are lost.
There were times in university where I had figured out the material on my own (maybe even several lectures ahead), and the confirmation actually felt a bit disappointing.
I like this idea but I always struggled to keep up with note taking. And the teachers were struggling to get through all the material. There was a race on both sides! But that was many years ago. If I were doing it today, I'd take pictures with my phone, use a computer to transcribe it, and then I'd have enough time to do what you said.
This is good advice for the LSAT too, and baked into LSAT Demon's app. If you can predict an answer before looking at the choices, you're probably on the right track.
Yes but if you don’t know the answer by the time the light goes on (the question is finished read), you will never get in. And if you buzz in without knowing the answer you will lose points. So you have to know the answer before the light goes , then be ready to buzz as soon as eligible. Jeopardy is a good example.
My technique was to write tons of notes during the lecture. In college, I would have many pages of notes for each lecture and because writing is more of an active process than just sitting or spacing out for an hour, I rarely had to study for an exam.
Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science. You either put in the effort to learn and struggle until you succeed or you don't. There is no secret sauce.
I've met lot of smart guys never getting anywhere, because they were always looking for a shortcut and not to do the real work.
Linux instructor Jason Canon wrote once that there's a lot of people who spend 90% of the time reading articles on how to learn Linux, but only 10% really practicing.
OTOH it's a really cool way to stay focused and engaged with the lecture.
I think a lot of writing online about productivity is like this. Some people seem to have a near endless appetite for writing on pens and notebooks, note taking systems, text editors, desk accesssories, every day carry, etc…
I've seen this a lot over the years and I've been guilty of it myself. I do still look at articles and find good stuff from it, but I've replaced it with paid courses that offer hands-on examples.
This isn't true. I put in a great deal of effort in college and struggled to learn. After college I changed the way I interacted with information, and found that I could learn and remember orders of magnitude better by using studying and practice techniques that mapped more closely with how I thought about information.
> Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science.
This is wrong. Not every "learning method" is pseudo-science, neither is comparison of the efficacy of different learning methods. As a trivial example, flat lecture and individual textbook reading is inferior to one-on-one discussion and tutoring with a native speaker if the aim is to learn a foreign language.
I'm not saying it's a learning method. And I don't see how anyone could mistake this for science, so why would it be pseudoscience? It's not really about effort either.
It's just a trick that helps me pay attention in lectures, which a lot of people struggle with. Certainly you have to put the work outside of the classroom as well.
I personally rarely joined group study sessions, but thinking back, I should have joined more of them.
To expand on one of the points listed here: do a first pass through questions before writing a single thing and mark which you feel are easy vs. hard (this evaluation may change once you start working on them!). Your prioritization should be: easier + higher points, easier + lower points, then hard in order of perceived difficulty weighted by points.
Oh, and if your course requires memorizing a set of known formulas, write them down first thing on the very last page :)
I've always studied with peers after classes (I'm a chemistry master) and it was the best way to learn. Discuss different ideas and approaches and understandings was a force multiplier.
> It has happened to me several times that I was stuck on some problem for an hour in the night, but was able to solve it in 5 minutes in the morning.
If you really try to solve a problem and then put it away for a day or two, you'll often find that your brain has done some good background processing on the problem.
I've experienced it multiple times and one of our professors recommended it as a "trick of the trade". But you have to do an serious attempt to solve the problem before you can send it to the background thread.
When I was cramming for a test the day before I would use an accelerated version of this. I would work on something difficult for maybe an hour or so, then go do something fun for a few minutes that required focus. Going for a walk just left me continually trying to work on the problem while I walked.
Back in the day I would play pool (had access to a pool table nearby). These days, I'd go play a video game that took skill and focus. I'd do this for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and hit that problem again. It didn't always work, but sometimes time pressures caused me to fall into a mental rut and when you're in one all you can seem to do is dig deeper.
I have some friends who say that "learning to learn" (the skill and the book with the same title) is key to being successful; specially if you're not a genius. Through my whole life, I met people who seemed nowhere near as bright as me but eventually got to surpass me both in academia and at work. From what I could observe about these people, the main difference was regularity; these people studied or wrote code every single day; they took small steps, but never stopped. Also there was the point of asking for help, not to get the answer, but to find a way out. There's also the "curse of the genius", but I don't think that is the case.
In the moments I was struggling the most in my life, what helped me the most was managing my time and finding ways to work a little bit every day, even if it was only writing down the plan of what I had to do. Pomodoro timers also helped me a lot to "start doing something".
I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities. I'm convinced that regularity and a good study strategy is enough to move even the weakest among the mediocres to attain a doctorate level. I saw some cases like these myself.
Richard Hamming in his "You and Your Research" talk compares it to compound interest:
What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.
It's like exercise: if you can withstand more training, you will get better results. The most important thing is not how hard you train, but how consistent you are at training.
The advice given here can be dangerous to some people: one should be cautious of exerting too much effort because "working harder allows you to get more done".
The useful bit of advice here is the consistency, not the quantity of work.
Yes, but remember the onus is on the student to figure out how they learn best. Tertiary education is no longer about spoon-feeding (adult) students everything.
Since the parent mentioned a book, here is the reference, and also two related Wikipedia pages regarding how to learn effectively:
I always overestimate how much I can do in one day and I underestimate how much I can get done in 100 days (with the caveat that I have to work on it consistently).
One really important factor is the grading curve, if used. At my university, I think the goal was to give the average student 60%, or a mid 2.1) with some formula for test score adjustment to compensate for particularly tough papers. The idea is that your score ends up representing your ability with respect to the cohort and the specific tests that you were given.
There were several courses that were considered easy, and as a consequence were well attended. You had to do significantly better in those classes to get a high grade, versus a low-attendance hard course where 50% in the test was curved up to 75%.
> One really important factor is the grading curve, if used.
I never use it to grade, because it is empirically unfair.
The further you move in the educational system, the less
people's aptitute matches a Gaussian or "normal" distribution.
(I also often fought a lot with management and HR when I was a manager in industry, as my team was hardly statistically normal (100% Ph.D.s from top places) imposing a Gaussian for bonus payments on a strongly left-skewed distribution is unfair. Microsoft introduced this and got into legal trouble, and many companies followed late and didn't realize the legal trouble part.)
It makes sense when applied across multiple instances of a test, if one cohort does terribly curve up, one really well curve them down relative to the overall distribution of scores.
But yeah within a single assignment it makes no sense to force a specific distribution. (People do this maybe because they don’t understand?)
Depends on the rigor. The typical grade school curriculum is expecting you to keep up and get 80-90% of the content on a first go. Colleges can experiment with a variety of other kinds of methods. It's college, so there's no sense of "standaridized" content at this point.
For some, there's the idea of pushing a student to their limit and breaking their boundaries. A student getting 50% on a hard course may learn more and overall perform better in their career than if they were an A student in an easy course. Should they be punished because they didn't game the course and try to get the easy one?
And of course, someone getting 80% in such a course is probably truly the cream of the crop which would go unnoticed in an easy course.
I think the prior probability in the bayesian sense is that the two entering cohorts are equally skilled (assuming students were randomly split into two sections as opposed to different sections being composed of different student bodies). If this were the case, the implication is that performance differences in standardized tests between cohorts are due to the professor (maybe one of the profs didn't cover the right material), so then normalization could be justified.
However if that prior is untrue for any reason whatsoever, the normalization would penalize higher performing cohorts (if it were a math course, maybe an engineering student dominated section vs an arts dominated cohort).
Right, and if it depends, maybe we just don't do it then?
Intuitively and in my experience, course content and exams are generally stable over many years, with only minor modifications as it evolves. Even different professors can sometimes have nearly identical exams for a given course, precisely so as to allow for better comparison.
Did the cohort due poorly or were the tests given to that cohort harder than in previous years? Or was the teacher a more difficult grader than others? You're jumping to the conclusion that the cohort was underperforming just because the grades were lower when other things out of their control could have been involved.
The idea is to identify if there is a particularly easy/hard exam and the average score of the cohort is significantly different to how they perform in other classes. "Doing poorly" is quite hard to define when none of the tests, perhaps outside of the core 1st and 2nd year modules, are standard.
Not really since then all students can learn the exam as a template after 2-3 exams leak.
The curving I know at uni was targeting to exmatriculate 45% by the 3rd semester and another 40% of that by the end so the grades were adjusted to where X% would fail each exam. Then your target wasn't understanding the material but being better than half of the students taking it. The problems were complicated and time was severely limited so it wasn't like you could really have a perfect score. Literally 1-2 people would get a perfect score in an exam taken by 1000 people with many exams not having a perfect score.
I was one of the exmatriculated and moving to more standard tests made things much easier since you can learn templates with no real understanding. For example an exam with 5 tasks would have a pool of 10 possible tasks, each with 3-4 variations and after a while the possibilities for variation would become clear so you could make a good guess on what this semesters slight difference will likely be.
I know that's the argument but it just leads to grade inflation and a diluted signal for the students ability
Any specific uncurved grade is already ultimately adjusted by the being put in a basket of other grades that the student obtained across many courses, which are generally uncorrelated (or at least just as uncorrelated before curving as they are after)
The act of grading itself is what's wrong with colleges. Different people learn at different paces. Forcing everyone to work at the fastest rate and then judging them for not performing is what kills interest in subjects. People should be allowed to write tests when they want to, learn at the pace they want to decide for themselves when it's time to move on, because lets face it, not everyone cares about some prof's pet subject.
The problem is that higher education became something marketable and universities decided to sell diplomas instead of giving people a chance to learn skills they think might help them reach their goals.
Depends, is your goal in college to get a high GPA and look good for a job, or to truly learn and master content but not look as attractive on a resume without other projects?
Grading curves aim to mitigate punishment for the latter. It's part of why I could get a 2.5 GPA but still overall succeed in my career.
It's one solution to a problem.
Which is that the results of tests are not strictly measuring how well the students understood the subject matter, but are heavily influenced by the quality of the rest and course as a whole.
That is generally hard to measure and frankly there is little accountability for bad courses. At the worst end you have bad profs who are proud of high failure rates because they don't understand it as a failure to teach but as a seal of quality how rigorous their standards are complex the subject matter is that they are teaching.
Not that grading on a curve solves any of that, but it eases the burden on students.
That won't work at elite schools like Stanford where a hard class average is like 98% and 94% will give you B+ due to the opposite curve being applied.
So another strategy to do well might include tempting your classmates to distraction or perhaps offering to "help" them but in fact feed them misinformation?
Got it.
You are typically the average of the people you keep around you. If you feel like you're going to get ahead by tricking your friends/peers then it likely means that you're not going to gain much when compared to the rest of the class (unless you're somehow able to deceive an entire class of 100+ students). On the flip side, if you and all your friends are supportive of each other then you're more likely to succeed when compared to the rest of the class. This does have the opposite effect of making it harder for students that don't have the same support/study groups but it goes completely against the point you're trying to make.
> Undergrads tend to have tunnel vision about their classes. They want to get good grades, etc. The crucial fact to realize is that noone will care about your grades, unless they are bad. For example, I always used to say that the smartest student will get 85% in all of his courses. This way, you end up with somewhere around 4.0 score, but you did not over-study, and you did not under-study.
It’s difficult to escape tunnel vision when your most urgent and highest priority task tends to be the required homework and studying you have right in front of you, and you directly get feedback on that work.
> Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck.
I agree with all the advice here, but in hindsight, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this. These things are all something you can do away from school, so while in school, it felt like a waste to not make use of the school to do things on my own.
Overall the advice is much easier said than done, even if it is something I completely agree with.
> I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this
I think back to my college years (2002-2006) and I don't recall being very receptive to explicit advice even if it was realistically applicable. Even given everything I know about myself now, I struggle to imagine how I could have persuaded my 20-year-old self to do anything with words alone.
In university, how can you get a 4.0 with an 85% average? In high school they added 1.0 to honors courses but I don’t remember the same thing happening in undergrad.
Grade inflation is common at many schools. And many difficult technical classes grade on a curve, sometimes to the point where you can get an A with an 85%.
But yeah, I still don't see how an 85% average would be a 4.0.
I never visited my professors or TAs during office hours. In retrospect, I see I missed free one-on-ones, not only to ask about assignments or tests, but also to talk about the big pictures, misunderstandings, etc, etc.
I spent few semesters of college sober, mostly just coasting through intro-level courses on my way to grad school. But it was magical when I actually cared about a subject / instructor, and got to know them during group study sessions / office hours. I learnt physical chemistry from one of the co-inventors of white LED — the baddest bitch in that college town (she did not gifeAF about anything but her own incredible inventions). Her equally-brilliant husband was my academic advisor (but you would never suspect they're married) =P
Our alumni network sends out a quarterly academic publication, and it's always nice to see how certain former peers/instructors "panned out" — e.g. a former classmate is now a nobel laureate (mutually-unknown, but I supported his team's hardware as a student job). My favorite are former TAs from my introductory labs that are now running their own quirky laboratories (many of us smoked.erryday.homies, at least at the time..).
It was only a decade after grad school that I realized how important people / networking can be. I am not a typical graduate, but "go Dores."
If the origin of that was a single study, you should learn about then replication crisis in psychology that called into question large swaths of results, after around 2/3rds of studies failed replication.
Both this advice and whatever the OP recommends are both subject to the “replication crisis” critique. At least until you dig in and become confident in the reliability of the research backing the claims. No research is cited in this article. Some of the advice seems unlikely to be research-based (“drink coffee 2 hours before the exam but not right before”).
Chalk it up to youth perhaps, but this piece would benefit, in my view, from more "for me..." or "I found..." and less "You should/must/are..."
I have reached a point in my life in which I recognize that I do not generally appreciate direct advice, especially not the unsolicited variety. Even the bits that I agree with in this piece are tainted by the many cases where I did the exact opposite of what he advises and excelled academically.
I find really helpful writing down by hand the key concepts or phrases I find impactful. Also I draw a lot of pictures to fix the stuff and link it with arrows to show the line of thought
While Andrej's advice may offer useful tips, it's important to consider that success strategies can vary significantly among individuals. What works for one person might not work for another due to different learning styles, backgrounds, and circumstances. Additionally, the educational landscape has evolved since 2013, so some advice may be outdated. Always critically evaluate any guidance and adapt it to your personal situation.
>Your time is a precious, limited resource. Get to a point where you don't screw up on a test and then switch your attention to much more important endeavors. [...] Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck.
While probably 90% of undergrads undershoot in terms of time spent on their courses, the other 10% "Goodhardt" their grades and misallocate their time and abilities.
Paraphrasing a saying that is popular among coaches:
Everyone has the desire to win but very few have the will to prepare to win.
Doing well in school is overwhelmingly about simply having the will to do the work. To read, listen, take notes, study, practice, and review. There's no magic.
"
Study well in advance.
Did I mention this already? Maybe I should stress it again. The brain really needs time to absorb material. Things that looked hard become easier with time.
You want to alocate ~3 days for midterms, ~6 days for exams.
"
Are you kidding? Don't expect to pass the calculus 3 exam I took as a Physics Engineer at Politecnico di Milano with less that one month (keep in mind: bare minimum) of studying ahead of the exam (lectures not included):
If you could actually get good grades with what Andrej said, I totally chose the wrong university.
In my physics group in Cambridge there was one student who was way better than the rest of us at physics although only normally bright at stuff outside of physics and the thing that was different about her was her dad was a physics prof and she was probably exposed to the advanced ideas a kid. I think in the same way kids pick up languages more easily than adults they may pick up other intellectual stuff.
It matters what topics are taught in elementary school, and how they are taught. We as society need to figure out what is going to be important in 40 years (when current kids are 45-50 years old) and ensure those things are started so they slowly have time to get the concepts.
I can be reasonably confident that logical thinking will be important, which you can get from Math (philosophy also has logic - is that useful too? My background is math so I don't know about that side). I'm sure other parts of math will be useful but not what. The BASIC I learned in school was worthless (it would have been useful as an introduction if my teachers didn't teach/test so many "facts" that were wrong - I was too shy to tell them that back then and now I'm mature enough to know I'd get in trouble without changing anything so there was no point)
I disagree. I made some of my best friends through all nighters and continue to occasionally pull them because they reinvigorate meaning into my work as they did my coursework.
If your only metric for success in school is your GPA, then yes all nighters aren’t worth it. But climbing a metric leaderboard isn’t the only measure of doing well in a course.
It is curious because Andrej recognizes this with his comments concerning coffee.
Occasional all-nighters can be fun. We even did them at work back in the dotcom days. I wouldn't do them now, because they don't really accomplish anything. But they can be fun.
Making friends is one of the most important reasons to go to college. Friends from that era of my life later hired me into excellent jobs that changed my generational wealth. About half of my friends met their life partners during college. Several of my lifelong best friends are people I met through college friends and activities.
The more career-minded
might call it "networking".
Why do friends need to be made through all-nighters? Could you have made the same friends by organizing study groups during regular hours, and then doing something else fun with those people in the evenings?
They don't have to be, nor am I claiming that all nighters are unilaterally positive. But they were an integral part of my college experience and many of my friends' and I enjoyed them in a type 2 fun kind of way.
Asserting that they're not worth it misses the broader picture.
Some good advice, but two of the pieces surprised me:
> Go to the prof before final exam at least once for office hours. - Even if you have no questions (make something up!) Profs will sometimes be willing to say more about a test in 1on1 basis (things they would not disclose in front of the entire class). Don't expect it, but when this does happen, it helps a lot. Does this give you an unfair advantage over other students? Sometimes. It's a little shady :) But in general it is a good idea to let the prof get to know you at least a little.
Were I a professor, and a student showed up to my office hours, to disingenuous BS me (e.g., making something up to get face time to advance their sociopath career, or to try to get exclusive hints on the exam), that would not be to their advantage.
ProTip: I wouldn't be thinking "What a wonderfully go-getter young person; I should write them a good recommendation, to help them gain more influence. Stanford hasn't inflicted nearly enough people like this upon the world."
> If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, jug an energy drink. - They work. It's just chemistry.*
Half of the students are already drugged to the gills. Students don't need celebrity alum endorsement of that.
You don't want people graduading as drugged-out zombies and narcissists, to then go on to found or lead sociopathic companies that make society worse.
I never did that in college because it seemed awfully manipulative to bother them unless I really needed it. It didn't even occur to me that that's what other people had been doing until I had almost graduated.
Being a student to me just really warps your perspective on the world because it confines you into such an arbitrary, stressful, gameable system that you either adapt to it and come out of it with a very flawed model of reality, reject it at your own peril, or suffer through it. I would rather get a B than transparently work my professor for an A- and it's concerning to think that the people who go on to become doctors and management consultants are disproportionately the ones who do that.
If someone can't figure out how to take advantage of widely available stimulants, it's a dramatic disadvantage in frankly all facets of life. There's no prize for deliberately hampering yourself by refusing to use the tools available to you.
If someone's seems obviously a sociopath from a single innocuous interaction, they're probably not a real sociopath. I'm not sure what the litmus test is for a "made-up" question vs. a genuine question based on the course material; the only difference is whether the student already knows the answer.
I think we're a bit too eager to throw around "sociopath." When I nod along to my boss' vacation story and ask him follow-up questions, I guess that also makes me a sociopath, because he's not a good storyteller and I'm not interested in Machu Picchu (this is a made up anecdote for illustrative purposes).
Were you a professor you might also be a bit more sympathetic to the pressure academia puts on students to make them suck up like this.
> Half of the students are already drugged to the gills.
He did advocate ample sleep and not pulling all-nighters, near the top of the article.
Not sociopaths, but sociopathic careers, as a term of condemnation.
And a lot of people light up the BS detector like they wouldn't believe.
Loosely put, the majority of them fit the stereotype who think that everyone is ruthlessly self-interested, but they don't think of it as ruthless, and they think of themselves and the others as (in Bay Area stereotype, for example) nice and cheerful and progressive. Their vague awareness not to be crass about it, according to the social conventions they've gotten in their peer groups thus far, is insufficient to hide it.
But others of them think they are "the alpha", and believe themselves to be more aggressive than others, and more meritorious. Yet, of the ones I've noticed (and this might be why I noticed them), they're not as smart as they think they are, when they try to manipulate, and don't know how to fake being someone they aren't. They instead lean on family money and connections, alliances with power structures, gaming, underhandedness, aggressiveness, etc.
Though I knew one very smart and very charismatic ruthless person, who was smart enough to avoid the tells, so I know they exist. One way of describing it is that they could play parts of different personalities, thinking of things the personality would think of, as needed for different audiences. Once they started tipping their hand, it was too late to stop them, and society is significantly worse for it. I speculate that these people are a very small minority, because I think otherwise they would have taken over more positions of power. Yet we can see that many powerful tech companies are headed by people who obviously do not have these qualities of brains, charisma, and empathy. Maybe the non-ruthless ones become great writers, actors, and teachers instead.
“Don't only hang out only with stronger students.
Weaker students will have you explain things to them and you will find that teaching the material helps A LOT with understanding.”
> Reading and understanding IS NOT the same as replicating the content.
This happens to me all the time. It's really important to try and replicate everything that you learn. I would go even further and constantly reaffirm that you still know how to prove facts that you take for granted.
> NEVER. EVER. EVER. Leave a test early.
Every time I find a mistake.
Some pieces that I really disagree with:
> Study very intensely RIGHT before the test.
I don't think this works, at least for me, it doesn’t. I never studied on test day unless the test was in the evening. Even in cases where I had ample time to study, I focused on preparing for my later tests. By the time test day rolls around, you either know the material or you don’t. I don’t think short-term memory is as valuable as the writer is making it out to be. I also worry that the added stress may cause you to confuse yourself when trying to frantically read through your notes or textbooks.
> If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, chug an energy drink.
Your health is more important than the tests you take. These energy drinks are terrible for you and your brain, in my opinion. After hours of sitting, drinking such a high concentration of sugar and caffeine is terrible for you. Just go out for a walk, take a shower, and if that doesn't help, go to sleep. Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.
> Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.
This strongly depends on what stage of the studying/cramming process you are on. If the option is between going over everything a third time, or going to bed, go to bed. If you've never successfully completed a problem in a certain part of the subject? Getting there will almost certainly be more valuable than the trade-off in sleep. No amount of sleep is going to fill holes in your knowledge.
> Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.
I think the trade-off of being a little jittery and possibly scoring better on an exam is probably worth it. Unless you turn it into a habit, a few hours short on sleep a month isn't going to measurably harm you. Then again, it depends on how much you stand to gain from studying those extra few hours - and it's equally important to be realistic on that quantity.
It has been nearly 20 years, but my rule of thumb was that I wouldn't leave until I had done *three* review passes of the test. That is, quadruple checking, completing the exam and then reviewing my answers three times. That is pretty far into the diminishing returns for me catching my own errors.
That *almost* never happens, but there are exceptions -- sometimes they really do give way way more time than you need, especially if you are already strong at the material in question.
With that said, the key point is that the time tradeoff here for leaving early is terrible in typical college classes that have heavy weight on exams. Especially the first 10 -20 minutes of double checking is very likely worth 5+ hours of homework time or study time in terms of points towards the grade.
> Places with a lot of background noise are bad and have a research-supported negative impact on learning. Libraries and Reading rooms work best.
This was horrible advice for me and caused my a lot of grief for many years wondering why I still couldn't focus.
Nothing against Andrej, part of the reason I hate this advice is that this is very common advice for what your environment should look like. This was advice given by study workshops at my college. I'm sure this works for a decent chunk of the student population.
Quiet places cause me to mentally drift into outer space and I just zone out.
You know what is a great environment? Semi-busy coffee shops + headphones + instrumental music. I'm able to consistently lock in for 4-5 hours. When I go back to my "nice quiet home environment" I get distracted immediately and refocusing is super hard.
Like I said, this is standard advice that works for a portion of the population, but I think this makes a ton of other people in the same boat as me feel lazy/discouraged/unfocused/stupid losers when in reality "nice quiet places" might not work for them.
My tip is if you're doing well in courses, ratchet it up with more challenging courses maybe outside of your major or take some proof heavy graduate courses (if in compsci/math).
I can't pay attention during lectures. Not "this is difficult" but "I cannot keep the sentence being spoken in memory long enough to understand it". They speak too slowly and take large pauses while writing.
I have found no solution for this besides watching recordings at a significantly faster speed, preferably clipping silences.
I have been tested and found explicit evidence of this short term memory deficiency which healthcare providers directly refused to address instead offering childish advice about sleep and self care offering SSRIs as well.
The real truth is that the good advice has always been dispensed, it's just that students don't want to listen.
1. Follow actively the lessons.
2. Study and exercise every day what you covered in the previous lessons
Every one of us has been given these age old platitudes, but, as spaced repetition, testing, and active recall prove, they are actually an excellent starting point for good performance
The problems were more obvious to me when I was older and trying to mentor college students.
Some of them just got it, absorbed good advice like a sponge, rejected bad advice, and did their best. They were unsurprisingly successful in life (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary)
The most frustrating cases were the students who got baited by angry internet advice. Reddit was a frequent source of bad advice. Some got pulled into 4Chan or Something Awful (depending on the era). Others were in weird IRC channels or Discords. All of them got poisoned by cynical online junk. I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway.
The hardest type for me to mentor were the students who had a bottomless bucket of excuses to pull from for everything in their life. Nothing was ever their fault, even if their failure was unambiguously traceable back to their lack of studying. It was always the fault of their professor, their roommate, their parents, their students, their friends, or even their mentors (me) because they had trained themselves to find someone or something to blame in every situation. Not surprisingly they were always failing to progress in life until they hit some situation that forced self-reflection and learning. Some of them managed to turn it around, but I can still find many of them angrily ranting into LinkedIn or other social media to this day.
Mentoring was hard. It was rewarding to work with the students who wanted to learn and knew how to prefer good advice over bad. For some it felt like most of the battle was just keeping them away from bad influences and resisting the urge to run to Reddit to find something that helped them believe nothing was their fault.
> (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary)
> I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway.
To be fair, it does seem to be pretty bad out there if your only definition of success is monetary.
The problem with cynicism and seeing everything as bullshit and unfair is that it's self-reinforcing. I used to wallow in that too because it was the only way to make sense of the world, because I just was not very happy and couldn't see what I would be able to do to change that.
Once I graduated from college and started working that completely changed for me, because I finally for the first time had some semblance of agency and real stakes in my life, and wasn't forced to spend all my time with other people my age who were just as lacking in real perspective and experience. Someone gave me real responsibility over something actually pretty important, I could speak up and do and change things in ways that weren't explicitly decided for me ahead of time, it wasn't all just a game anymore.
Being a student is essentially modeled as a zero-sum audition for the real world that is simultaneously extremely low stakes (nobody else really cares about what you're doing) and high stakes (if you fail you could seriously harm your future life). You live completely at the whim of institutions with deadlines and gameable processes. The students who seemed legitimately happy to me were either the ones who didn't feel the same kind of pressure to succeed or those who legitimately found it meaningful to participate in school clubs and work professors for higher grades (go to all their office hours to get help with homework, argue for higher grades). Of course there was fun to be had too but the entire environment is engineered for cynicism, it forces you into a ghetto of inexperience and helplessness.
That is not to say that cynicism is good, and obviously the students who used it as an excuse not to learn or take accountability for their own actions or lack thereof were seriously harming themselves. But I do not think it is entirely irrational, given their perspective of the world as one in which they have very little agency and the rules are almost all artificial, to perceive it that way.
For two years I wrote notes in class on yellow legal pad. After class, I rewrote into a spiral notebook, one for each class. That way I only carried a legal pad to each class everyday.
Not surprisingly, my grades those two years were great. Never had the fortitude to keep it up.
It sounds obvious, but I wonder if this works for everyone. I've always had a very hard time to follow lessons (I studied maths then CS), but did work hard on the side and ultimately did quite well at tests and national exams.
I think the lecture format didn't work well for me, and I would have been better off with the just material, and access to a professor for questions.
I suspect the reason is that most late-teens/early-twenty-somethings are not responsible/emotionally mature enough to put in the required amount of work in the relatively free environment of university where nobody is checking if you’re doing your homework or show up to class.
Related, for me, was that high school just wasn't very challenging. I got As without ever really studying or feeling that I was working very hard. I took that approach into university and it worked for my freshman and most of my sophomore courses. Then things got actually tough and I realized I could not just intuit my way through exams, and I had never really learned how to study.
Failing to realise that school was just about learning how to learn was also the main mistake I made, for the same reason as you. I was always good at soaking up stuff I found interesting, but to this day learning something because I have to is hard, awful work.
Yeah, it's like most people know exercise is good for body. But good luck my rational mind getting me to the gym on most days
That said I do think even the seemingly obvious need to be repeated often because the audience keeps changing. So it is _new_ for someone, it may change someone's perspective
Tests are all bullshit. They are just some arbitrary questions, trying to figure out whether you understood the material, which were made up by some guy who has much more important things to do.
If you want to spend your time well, either do networking or try to understand the material. If you are there trying to game the system (which hilariously Karpathy is suggesting you do, in a very mild way) then you should seriously consider why you are there in the first place.
Also consider that when you are tested outside of school you will always be tested to face to face.
Yep, and they are often scaled by the "Normal Curve". The catch with this flawed reasoning is that a Normal Distribution requires multiple independent imputs where none is deterministic. Having a professor and a curriculum are together goes against that proposition. There needs to be a better distribution to measure varation within an effective teaching method. Teaching towards a normal distributon result favors giving tests with flawed grading and other bad practices. In the late 1980s I didn't want to pursue a PHD due to the bleak future of acedemia, but if I had this would have been a major focus as it is causing a myriad of problems in our society abusing higher eduction students in this way.
The second half of this explains why he suggests gaming it, and seems to boil down to Grant Allen's maxim of "Don't let your schooling interfere with your education"
I don't miss university at all. In hindsight most of it was a scam and I learnt most things on my own either by opening a book, starting my own project or through research.
You don't need a 50 point list to learn anything even to a proficient level. Exams are bullshit.
To me it seems Andrej Karpathy is like the new AI guru. In this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329 he predicted the future of AI a decade ahead. Do not get me wrong, I do think he is very knowledgable on the subject.
Is guru being used in some special sense here? Cuz Karpathy has been an AI luminary for at least 10 years. This post for instance taught RL to a whole generation https://karpathy.github.io/2016/05/31/rl/.
Even if you're not allowed to bring it to the exam. Writing things down helps. What you want is to cram the entire course on 1 or more pages that you can in the end tile in front of you and say with high degree of confidence "This is exactly everything I must know"
Reminds me of this comedy bit in an American sitcom from about 35 years ago where the dumb kid when asked how his history test said it went okay but admitted he cheated. He explained that he tried to write down everything on his arm, there was not enough room despite multiple attempts at it. Then he realized he was starting to remember some of the content after the several rewrites, and said "so I just did it that way! I hid it all in my head and it was great! The professor didn't even know that I was cheating because there was no evidence!"
This sounds like something Reese from "Malcolm in the Middle" would do and say.
Looking back at my time at university, I have to admit that I mainly attended group study sessions in order to spend more time with the attractive singles in our course. This had the accidental benefit of forcing me to study and discuss the material more (which led to better understanding) so that I could help coach others. That in turn led to 1) a reasonable side-hustle in tutoring and 2) dating and marrying my wife.
> I mainly attended group study sessions in order to spend more time with the attractive singles
This is the plot of the brilliant tv show _Community_
> This had the accidental benefit of forcing me to study and discuss the material more (which led to better understanding) so that I could help coach others.
The few times when someone tried to explain things to me live, lead to my brain just kinda blanking because of the time pressure and whatnot and it wasn't very useful for me.
Instead, if I wanted to learn something properly, I'd have to just dig into the material myself and iterate on it. Consulting others worked better over text, in a group chat or forum or whatever.
I could only discuss a topic when I already had good grasp of it and felt confident about it. At that point it was more for the benefit of others, outside of finding niche cases that I didn't run into myself.
Same here. People trying to share information I have no interest in? Impossible to learn. My brain finding some interesting topic? Impossible to avoid ingesting all the knowledge about it.
Makes the first ~18 years of your life kind of difficult, as school basically is mostly the first part with not so much the second, but once you complete school or drop out to start working, being able to do the second part seems like a godsend compared to your peers.
this is disturbingly similar to the comment just above it :-). Congratulations.. If you by accident demonstrate desirable attributes or qualities while being observed by another sex, you run the risk of attracting them :-)
(apologies in advance to those who wish to attract the same sex; I assume it works there too).
> I mainly attended group
yup
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Although this advice is quite comprehensive, I think it assumes that you've already kept up with the pace of the course. In some schools, the curriculum moves so fast that students are thrown into problem sets before they’ve even grasped the basics. I’d love to see how he would advise someone who's already fallen behind and trying to catch up. For many people, that’s the more realistic situation.
This advice is aimed at students who are already getting good-great grades but want to optimise further. Advice for students that get poor grades is quite different.
That being said my grades in university were middling to poor and once I got out I applied for jobs with my degree in hand and not a single one asked for my academic transcript. Perhaps more prestigious graduate positions might have, but I just didn’t apply for those. But I got various positions and my career took off just fine.
Now the idea that anyone would care about my university grades seems laughable. So, it’s important to remember that learning in university is important but if you don’t get amazing grades it’s not something people should stress about too much IMO.
Plenty of places ask for GPA for university graduates, and a low ine is disqualifying. After a few years no one will ever care again, again unless you want to go to a grad school like an MBA, where a very low GPA can again be disqualifying
maybe if you want to attend a top MBA program at some schools, but since it's intended for a diverse range of undergrad degrees and there are a million MBA programs you can find one that will let you in. They also focus on your final coursework where most people have by then learned how to get at least decent grades and your GMAT score so a couple of early bad years won't disqualify you.
>Now the idea that anyone would care about my university grades seems laughable.
Sadly, this current batch of graducates can't grab anything even with decent schools and grades. Some are putting a huge emphasis only on Tier 1 schools. Crazy how quickly everything changed.
Fascinating. I wondered if this would suggest note-taking in lectures (it doesn't). This is something I never did and then finally I bent to everyone saying it's the most important thing and I did awfully in Algebraic Geometry. I had to return to my old technique of just paying 100% attention with 0% note taking, and then creating short cheat sheets of techniques in LaTeX before the exam.
This is the first time I've come across any college advice that does not mention this and I'm glad for it. I just never got good at note-taking to be able to properly pay attention to the lecture.
I did not, it distracted me from listening. One of the key things to do was to do and not only read as many exercises as possible, including the old ones of the same professor. Then going back to reading the material once you got stuck.
Most of the time I studied with a good friend who had to go to the army and did not want to lose those years. So I prepared everything during the semester and taught it to him when he took some days off before the exams. Tough times but worked well for both of us.
A very good focus operator for exams was to ask the TA questions in the last exercises. The topics they answered quickly had a high chance of being relevant, because they had prepared them for the exams.
I find notes useful only in that they need to try to to figure out what to write next keeps me from daydreaming. I have dysgraphia so there is no hope I can read any notes latter, nor is there hope that I could possibly transcribe what is said word for words so I'm looking for the main points - which is what is most commonly recommended you write down.
I never got this idea that taking notes distracts you from listening. To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write (especially in math, where I usually rewrote some proofs on the fly so they were less ambiguous and more easy to check for correctness later).
Depends on your note-taking strategy. I would just transcribe what the professor was saying and ended up not paying attention. I turned my brain into a transcription machine and didn't take any time to grok anything I heard, then I had to re-read the textbook later. Nobody ever "taught" me how to study, so I was bad at it. Failed my way through high school and dropped out of college
I am the same way— I find note taking distracts me such that I end up missing important things, and my notes are usually worthless too. I did pretty well at school with my no-notes approach. Obviously it’s useful to write down assignments, or the occasional verbatim example from the whiteboard. But for me, notes usually hinder more than they help.
I have a tip for following lectures (or any technical talk, really) that I've been meaning to write about for a while.
As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track of how things fit into the big picture. For example in a math class, there may be a big theorem that they're working towards using lots of smaller lemmas. How will it all come together?
When you get it right, it will feel like you are figuring out the material on your own, rather than having it explained to you. This is the most important part.
If you can manage to stay one step ahead of the lecturer, it will keep you way more engaged than trying to write everything down. Writing puts you one step behind what the speaker is saying. Because of this, I usually don't take any notes at all. It obviously works better when lecture notes are made available, but you can always look at the textbook.
People often assume that I have read the material or otherwise prepared for lectures, seminars, etc., because of how closely I follow what the speaker is saying. But really most talks are quite logical, and if you stay engaged it's easy to follow along. The key is to not zone out or break your concentration, and I find this method helps me immensely.
This is fun to do during lectures but in my experience only about 5-10% of my learning happened in math class. The other 90% happened at home as I worked through the problem sets.
Essentially the lectures served as an inefficient way of delivering me a set of notes which I’d then reference during homework sessions. I could often predict what was coming next in the lecture but the really hard parts were the key parts in some technical lemmas that were necessary to complete the theorem. Learning how to figure out a key step like that had to come completely on my own (with no spoilers).
In a lot of ways, math lectures really started to turn into an experience similar to watching a Let’s Play of a favourite video game. Watching those can tell you exactly what you need to do to get past the part where you’re stuck but they don’t in general make you better at video games. For that you need to actually play them yourself.
The viewpoint of a lecture as an inefficient note delivery system is a pretty common and reductive view. Your "Let's Play" analogy was pretty apt though.
I think their (potential) value seems pretty clear when you look at language courses -- you can't possibly hope to develop fluency in a language by studying it in isolation from books -- forming your own sentences and hearing how other human beings do the same in real time is pretty decisive.
With math classes, YMMV, especially since they are rarely so interactive at the upper division and graduate level, but at the very least seeing an instructor talk about math and work through problems (and if you are lucky to have a particularly disorganized one, get stuck, and get themselves unstuck) can go a long way. But to be fair I regularly skipped math lectures in favor of reading too, heh
I rarely skipped math lectures in university (only when the prof was really bad; but then I watched video lectures taught by a different prof from a previous term).
The lectures in the hardest math classes I took did not feature any “working through problems.” They were 50 minute pedal-to-the-metal proof speedrun sessions that took me 2-3 hours of review and practice work to fully understand. I don’t know how anyone can see a lecture like that and not see it as an inefficient note delivery system.
I did have math classes where profs worked through problems but those were generally the much easier applied math classes. Those were the ones I least needed to attend lectures for because there you’re just following the steps of an algorithm rather than having to think hard about how to synthesize a proof.
For language learning it’s hard to beat full immersion. When we learn our first language (talking to our parents as children) we don’t learn it by theory (memorizing verb conjugations), we learn it by engaging the language centre in our brains. I think language classes are more useful if you want to learn to write and translate in that language, where you need a strong theoretical background. If your main goal for language learning is being able to speak with loved ones or being able to travel and speak fluently with locals, then sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture seems like a very difficult way to do that.
I consider the value in math lectures to come from the speaker’s explanation of why to expect certain things. Is this an obvious fact in another context, rewritten for this application? Is this a surprise? What reasons besides the rigorous argument are there for believing the theory?
A lot of the theorems I learned in school weren’t particularly amenable to intuitive explanations like that.
For example, take Galois theory. The fact that a polynomial’s solvability by radicals depends on the solvability of its Galois group is surprising and not intuitive at all. The fundamental theorem of Galois theory is a very technical result utilizing purpose-built mathematical structures that were developed specifically to study the solutions of polynomial equations.
I had a math professor in college that would often say to our class, "You cannot be like Michael Jordan by just watching Michael Jordan. If you want to be better at basketball, you have to practice. Math is no different." No matter how you spin it, he was correct -- unless you are like Ramanujan and a Hindu god just reveals a solution to you.
Honestly though, I believe I learn better in a similar manner to what you described. I would rather just read the textbook and learn on my own. I find that to be a far more efficient learning style for me. However, I typically always went to class for a handful of reasons:
1. To signal that I cared about the subject to the professor (whether I honestly cared or not). Though I had some classes that actually penalized a lack of attendance.
2. There is comradery in group struggle. It was nice way to meet other students that had a common goal. I made many friends during my time. Some of which I still keep in touch with a decade later. In fact, I met my SO in one of my classes -- all because we studied together.
3. The main reason being, I paid for the class, and I wanted to get my money's worth out of it. While passing the course and learning the material was the goal. I'd hate knowing I just paid to teach myself everything. I could have done that for free, so I wanted something more out of the deal.
One of thing I should add is that I am poorly disciplined and have poor executive functioning, so I probably picked up more in class that I would admit -- I didn't have a control to compare against. Still to this date, I rely heavily on solutions to the problems. Not in a way that allows me to cheat, but I would likely be unable to be certain I was teaching myself correctly if I didn't have the answers or know of a method to verify my work. I am confident that I cannot be confident in my answers to nearly anything. I am prone to too many mistakes.
If one goes far enough in math, one will encounter solutions where there are not clear answers and one must use all of their knowledge and abilities to support their answers. And that my YN friends, is why I am not a mathematician despite my love for the subject.
- I find that writing notes in class helped me learn just through the physical action of my hands. (I think there is some formal study of this as a phenomenon). I am poorly disciplined so at least getting that hour or so of writing notes is probably more than I would have managed alone.
- In class, sometimes the lecturer provides helpful intuition for something through informal speech or even intonation. For example I struggled with the concept of ergodicity from a textbook until I saw someone explain it to me like I'm 5. I find that often, textbooks are like man pages, in that they are almost afraid to provide informal/intuitive writing for fear of appearing unserious.
p.s. if ChatGPT existed 30 years ago I would have managed to learn so much more instead of spinning wheels on dry writing. ChatGPT is really good at being a "personalized manpage explainer"
Agree with this comment but follow up to this tip:
Only use this as a learning technique. Do not accidentally let this bleed over into personal 1:1 conversations.
I know some people in my life who are "smart" and they will cut people off in the middle of conversation to the effect of "oh yeah I already know what you are going to say, let me go ahead and cut you off so I can respond faster".
On top of being completely obnoxious on the face of it, they are wrong enough times in their predictions to where it completely fucks the conversation.
I take it you are not a member of the Church of Interruption[0] then.
https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html
Incompatible communication styles (turn-taking vs. constructive overlapping) can be frustrating. Turn-takers may consider overlappers to be rude and aggressive and try to stop the overlap, which overlappers may in turn consider rude and aggressive; yet full-duplex is more efficient than half-duplex and even basic ACKs are important for reliable communication.
Unfortunately Zoom is 1/N-duplex, which ruins it for everyone.
Thanks for this.
I find having a name to certain phenomena makes them easier to understand and apply in the wild, and will definitely think ‘barker’ in the future haha
Good point! I used to be guilty of this myself, so now I'm pretty sensitive about other people doing it. I am now one of the more senior students in an academic research group, and some of the younger members would benefit from this advice. I think it's a symptom of sophomorism, and hopefully most will grow out of it.
I agree it's especially frustrating when they don't even get it right. That crosses the line for me, and I will admonish them to let me finish what I am saying.
Well said. And it makes sense, if you define intelligence as the ability to successfully predict the future.
And how interesting that that is literally how LLMs are trained during pretraining. Like Ilya said: To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of a detective novel, you must have followed the plot, have world knowledge about physics, psychology, etc..
And that’s what you’re pointing at here. Testing yourself on the ability to predict during a lecture is like running a loss function to keep you on your toes.
> To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of a detective novel, you must have...
Wait, can people do this??
Oh yea. A good detective novel gives the reader all the necessary information to know the answer. Many lousier novels just keep some essential information hidden until the monologue, because they haven’t got a tricky enough mystery, and really shitty ones just accidentally reveal it, often by over-using tropes or having silly patterns like “it’s always the dark and brooding guy”. Ever read any Dan Brown? In Angels and Demons he gives it away on the first page with an anagram.
And this is why someone made a ruleset for detective novels, so they can actually become brain-teaser https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/tips-masters/ronald-k...
That monologue curtain pull is a hallmark of Sherlock Holmes. I wouldn’t call Doyle’s books lousy for that though. Creating brain-teasers for the audience isn’t really the point. It’s all about a character Doyle found insufferable but the audience loved!
People who read detective novels do. Every other book the clues are not the point and so they are skipped - or more likely there is no investigation, you are just told and the plot moves on.
It’s usually none of the people you can think about (otherwise it’s a very bad plot).
If that is true, which sometimes it is, you having suspected about anyone except the actual murderer, and at the same time it is totally obvious who the culprit is on a second reading, then it is a very good plot.
This worked great for me.
It meant that I understood the scaffolding of the course: the broad goals of the subject, the main ways to tackle them, what is currently being explored, and why are we going in this direction at this moment.
There was one class where this started to fail, which was a class without slides or a book. This meant that, without notes, when I recalled a proof technique but not the details, I had to resort to asking others for their notes. Because it wasn't documented anywhere else.
Which is why I hate the PowerPoint presentation-based lectures. Speaker typically goes too fast, and their brain does not actually break down the arguments into logical steps. They just read the slides.
Chalk and board is the way.
Reading from slides is the absolute worst way of delivery anywhere, whether it’s a lecture or an internal presentation to your work team, doesn’t matter. The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles.
Chalk and board though is not necessarily the best. Power point supports magic hotkeys - B and W - and allows drawing on slides. When done properly with a stylus, it’s incrementally better in almost every way than chalk, though a proper lecture hall with multiple blackboards will still hold its own.
I slightly disagree. Specifically, in the case of academic lectures, on:
> The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles.
Especially when not taking notes, having the slides effectively be lecture notes is great to allow you to go back to the content of the lecture days or weeks later.
That does not mean that I want a lecturer to just read from the slides. But I want the slides to be more than just a visual aid for the lecture. They need to be reference material as well. This is also generally accepted, and can be considered the reason so many other presentations where this is a bad idea, still have the bad lecture-style slides. Because its what is modeled to people during their education.
Note, for presentations to stakeholders, or presentations of results, or almost any other type of professional presentation. Slides should probably be visual aids only, and not reference material. But lectures are a special case.
I strongly agree - I started teaching from slides and shifted more and more to blackboard and chalk.
I found that they can also be combined well by showing a slide that gives some guidance where "we" are in the material, supplemented by writing and drawing on the blackboard to explain one or more bullet points or statements from the slides, and to answer student questions.
This also forces students to take additional notes, which helps them per muscle memory.
Watching someone up front and seeing them actually think is so inspiring.
This is a fantastic tip, thank you for sharing! It reminded me of an article similar to this one:
Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact (The minds of social species are strikingly resonant): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synch...
"... when people converse or share an experience, their brain waves synchronize. Neurons in corresponding locations of the different brains fire at the same time, creating matching patterns ..."
"The experience of “being on the same wavelength” as another person is real, and it is visible in the activity of the brain."
"Synchrony may be a sign of shared cognitive processing ..." "The mouse study suggested another level of meaning for synchrony: it predicts the outcomes of future interactions."
This is exactly how I read research papers and how I advocate others read them as well. As you read try to figure out how you would solve the problem outlined and what experiments you would need to perform.
That may require some experience, which you can obtain gradually by reading lots of papers, some good, some bad, to see how they do it. Eventually, you can tell if an experiment is suitable for showing strong support of the RQ or not.
(And you will also learn to read between the lines e.g. "Our resulst are PROMISING..." = there is much space for improvement etc.)
Great advice! Personally, I got immense value from writing notes but never when I wrote them during the lecture. 30 minutes after the lecture has ended is a perfect time time to sit down in the library and write notes for what the lecture was about. This gives enough time to reflect about the big picture, but not so too much time that the details are lost.
There were times in university where I had figured out the material on my own (maybe even several lectures ahead), and the confirmation actually felt a bit disappointing.
I like this idea but I always struggled to keep up with note taking. And the teachers were struggling to get through all the material. There was a race on both sides! But that was many years ago. If I were doing it today, I'd take pictures with my phone, use a computer to transcribe it, and then I'd have enough time to do what you said.
This is good advice for the LSAT too, and baked into LSAT Demon's app. If you can predict an answer before looking at the choices, you're probably on the right track.
Required for success at games like Jeopardy. Guess the answer before you read the whole thing
Jeopardy is a bad example because you're required to wait until the end of the question before buzzing in, or else you are penalized.
Yes but if you don’t know the answer by the time the light goes on (the question is finished read), you will never get in. And if you buzz in without knowing the answer you will lose points. So you have to know the answer before the light goes , then be ready to buzz as soon as eligible. Jeopardy is a good example.
My technique was to write tons of notes during the lecture. In college, I would have many pages of notes for each lecture and because writing is more of an active process than just sitting or spacing out for an hour, I rarely had to study for an exam.
There’s a whole science of learning, and this barely scratches the surface.
Spaces repetition for memory work.
Problem solving skills just be strengthened somehow.
Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science. You either put in the effort to learn and struggle until you succeed or you don't. There is no secret sauce.
I've met lot of smart guys never getting anywhere, because they were always looking for a shortcut and not to do the real work.
Linux instructor Jason Canon wrote once that there's a lot of people who spend 90% of the time reading articles on how to learn Linux, but only 10% really practicing.
OTOH it's a really cool way to stay focused and engaged with the lecture.
I think a lot of writing online about productivity is like this. Some people seem to have a near endless appetite for writing on pens and notebooks, note taking systems, text editors, desk accesssories, every day carry, etc…
Yak-shaving.
I've seen this a lot over the years and I've been guilty of it myself. I do still look at articles and find good stuff from it, but I've replaced it with paid courses that offer hands-on examples.
This isn't true. I put in a great deal of effort in college and struggled to learn. After college I changed the way I interacted with information, and found that I could learn and remember orders of magnitude better by using studying and practice techniques that mapped more closely with how I thought about information.
Learning is a loop of reading/listening > applying/questioning. The rest is gobbledygook.
And when I say learning, I mean understanding the material, not just remembering a bunch of information for an exam.
Your quote:
> Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science.
This is wrong. Not every "learning method" is pseudo-science, neither is comparison of the efficacy of different learning methods. As a trivial example, flat lecture and individual textbook reading is inferior to one-on-one discussion and tutoring with a native speaker if the aim is to learn a foreign language.
You missed the keyword "mostly".
I'm not saying it's a learning method. And I don't see how anyone could mistake this for science, so why would it be pseudoscience? It's not really about effort either.
It's just a trick that helps me pay attention in lectures, which a lot of people struggle with. Certainly you have to put the work outside of the classroom as well.
There are are a 100 different ways to struggle to learn. Some of them are better than others. I don't see how that's pseudoscience.
There are 100 different sources to learn from. And they certainly aren't as good as one another.
There being 100 different ways to learn though is questionable.
This is excellent advice.
I personally rarely joined group study sessions, but thinking back, I should have joined more of them.
To expand on one of the points listed here: do a first pass through questions before writing a single thing and mark which you feel are easy vs. hard (this evaluation may change once you start working on them!). Your prioritization should be: easier + higher points, easier + lower points, then hard in order of perceived difficulty weighted by points.
Oh, and if your course requires memorizing a set of known formulas, write them down first thing on the very last page :)
I've always studied with peers after classes (I'm a chemistry master) and it was the best way to learn. Discuss different ideas and approaches and understandings was a force multiplier.
> It has happened to me several times that I was stuck on some problem for an hour in the night, but was able to solve it in 5 minutes in the morning.
If you really try to solve a problem and then put it away for a day or two, you'll often find that your brain has done some good background processing on the problem.
I've experienced it multiple times and one of our professors recommended it as a "trick of the trade". But you have to do an serious attempt to solve the problem before you can send it to the background thread.
When I was cramming for a test the day before I would use an accelerated version of this. I would work on something difficult for maybe an hour or so, then go do something fun for a few minutes that required focus. Going for a walk just left me continually trying to work on the problem while I walked.
Back in the day I would play pool (had access to a pool table nearby). These days, I'd go play a video game that took skill and focus. I'd do this for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and hit that problem again. It didn't always work, but sometimes time pressures caused me to fall into a mental rut and when you're in one all you can seem to do is dig deeper.
I have some friends who say that "learning to learn" (the skill and the book with the same title) is key to being successful; specially if you're not a genius. Through my whole life, I met people who seemed nowhere near as bright as me but eventually got to surpass me both in academia and at work. From what I could observe about these people, the main difference was regularity; these people studied or wrote code every single day; they took small steps, but never stopped. Also there was the point of asking for help, not to get the answer, but to find a way out. There's also the "curse of the genius", but I don't think that is the case.
In the moments I was struggling the most in my life, what helped me the most was managing my time and finding ways to work a little bit every day, even if it was only writing down the plan of what I had to do. Pomodoro timers also helped me a lot to "start doing something".
I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities. I'm convinced that regularity and a good study strategy is enough to move even the weakest among the mediocres to attain a doctorate level. I saw some cases like these myself.
Richard Hamming in his "You and Your Research" talk compares it to compound interest:
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.htmlIt's like exercise: if you can withstand more training, you will get better results. The most important thing is not how hard you train, but how consistent you are at training.
The advice given here can be dangerous to some people: one should be cautious of exerting too much effort because "working harder allows you to get more done".
The useful bit of advice here is the consistency, not the quantity of work.
> ... should be offered by universities.
Yes, but remember the onus is on the student to figure out how they learn best. Tertiary education is no longer about spoon-feeding (adult) students everything.
Since the parent mentioned a book, here is the reference, and also two related Wikipedia pages regarding how to learn effectively:
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn, Gordon and Breach, 1997. https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Art-Doing-Science-Engineering-Le...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system
I always overestimate how much I can do in one day and I underestimate how much I can get done in 100 days (with the caveat that I have to work on it consistently).
> I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities.
Agreed but i also think it should be focused on much earlier as well.
One really important factor is the grading curve, if used. At my university, I think the goal was to give the average student 60%, or a mid 2.1) with some formula for test score adjustment to compensate for particularly tough papers. The idea is that your score ends up representing your ability with respect to the cohort and the specific tests that you were given.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/current/teach/general/...
There were several courses that were considered easy, and as a consequence were well attended. You had to do significantly better in those classes to get a high grade, versus a low-attendance hard course where 50% in the test was curved up to 75%.
> One really important factor is the grading curve, if used.
I never use it to grade, because it is empirically unfair.
The further you move in the educational system, the less people's aptitute matches a Gaussian or "normal" distribution.
(I also often fought a lot with management and HR when I was a manager in industry, as my team was hardly statistically normal (100% Ph.D.s from top places) imposing a Gaussian for bonus payments on a strongly left-skewed distribution is unfair. Microsoft introduced this and got into legal trouble, and many companies followed late and didn't realize the legal trouble part.)
I don't think I'll ever understand/accept the idea of curving grades.
It makes sense when applied across multiple instances of a test, if one cohort does terribly curve up, one really well curve them down relative to the overall distribution of scores.
But yeah within a single assignment it makes no sense to force a specific distribution. (People do this maybe because they don’t understand?)
Even in that case it doesn't make sense. Why should the underperforming cohort be rewarded for doing poorly?
Depends on the rigor. The typical grade school curriculum is expecting you to keep up and get 80-90% of the content on a first go. Colleges can experiment with a variety of other kinds of methods. It's college, so there's no sense of "standaridized" content at this point.
For some, there's the idea of pushing a student to their limit and breaking their boundaries. A student getting 50% on a hard course may learn more and overall perform better in their career than if they were an A student in an easy course. Should they be punished because they didn't game the course and try to get the easy one?
And of course, someone getting 80% in such a course is probably truly the cream of the crop which would go unnoticed in an easy course.
I think the prior probability in the bayesian sense is that the two entering cohorts are equally skilled (assuming students were randomly split into two sections as opposed to different sections being composed of different student bodies). If this were the case, the implication is that performance differences in standardized tests between cohorts are due to the professor (maybe one of the profs didn't cover the right material), so then normalization could be justified.
However if that prior is untrue for any reason whatsoever, the normalization would penalize higher performing cohorts (if it were a math course, maybe an engineering student dominated section vs an arts dominated cohort).
So I guess.. it depends
Right, and if it depends, maybe we just don't do it then?
Intuitively and in my experience, course content and exams are generally stable over many years, with only minor modifications as it evolves. Even different professors can sometimes have nearly identical exams for a given course, precisely so as to allow for better comparison.
Did the cohort due poorly or were the tests given to that cohort harder than in previous years? Or was the teacher a more difficult grader than others? You're jumping to the conclusion that the cohort was underperforming just because the grades were lower when other things out of their control could have been involved.
Tests are generally almost identical YoY where as humans are all very different! I think I'm making the simpler argument here
The idea is to identify if there is a particularly easy/hard exam and the average score of the cohort is significantly different to how they perform in other classes. "Doing poorly" is quite hard to define when none of the tests, perhaps outside of the core 1st and 2nd year modules, are standard.
Tests can be consistent over time without being a true standard. Student competency can vary much more greatly than test content.
Not really since then all students can learn the exam as a template after 2-3 exams leak.
The curving I know at uni was targeting to exmatriculate 45% by the 3rd semester and another 40% of that by the end so the grades were adjusted to where X% would fail each exam. Then your target wasn't understanding the material but being better than half of the students taking it. The problems were complicated and time was severely limited so it wasn't like you could really have a perfect score. Literally 1-2 people would get a perfect score in an exam taken by 1000 people with many exams not having a perfect score.
I was one of the exmatriculated and moving to more standard tests made things much easier since you can learn templates with no real understanding. For example an exam with 5 tasks would have a pool of 10 possible tasks, each with 3-4 variations and after a while the possibilities for variation would become clear so you could make a good guess on what this semesters slight difference will likely be.
It is, among other things, a way to adjust for the quality of evaluation and/or the quality of teaching.
I know that's the argument but it just leads to grade inflation and a diluted signal for the students ability
Any specific uncurved grade is already ultimately adjusted by the being put in a basket of other grades that the student obtained across many courses, which are generally uncorrelated (or at least just as uncorrelated before curving as they are after)
This posts sums up everything that's wrong with grading and modern colleges.
The act of grading itself is what's wrong with colleges. Different people learn at different paces. Forcing everyone to work at the fastest rate and then judging them for not performing is what kills interest in subjects. People should be allowed to write tests when they want to, learn at the pace they want to decide for themselves when it's time to move on, because lets face it, not everyone cares about some prof's pet subject.
The problem is that higher education became something marketable and universities decided to sell diplomas instead of giving people a chance to learn skills they think might help them reach their goals.
Depends, is your goal in college to get a high GPA and look good for a job, or to truly learn and master content but not look as attractive on a resume without other projects?
Grading curves aim to mitigate punishment for the latter. It's part of why I could get a 2.5 GPA but still overall succeed in my career.
It's one solution to a problem. Which is that the results of tests are not strictly measuring how well the students understood the subject matter, but are heavily influenced by the quality of the rest and course as a whole.
That is generally hard to measure and frankly there is little accountability for bad courses. At the worst end you have bad profs who are proud of high failure rates because they don't understand it as a failure to teach but as a seal of quality how rigorous their standards are complex the subject matter is that they are teaching.
Not that grading on a curve solves any of that, but it eases the burden on students.
That won't work at elite schools like Stanford where a hard class average is like 98% and 94% will give you B+ due to the opposite curve being applied.
I went to Stanford and that was absolutely not the case. I once got an A on a midterm with a 65%
What I mentioned was the case in some hard CS classes I took there.
So another strategy to do well might include tempting your classmates to distraction or perhaps offering to "help" them but in fact feed them misinformation? Got it.
You are typically the average of the people you keep around you. If you feel like you're going to get ahead by tricking your friends/peers then it likely means that you're not going to gain much when compared to the rest of the class (unless you're somehow able to deceive an entire class of 100+ students). On the flip side, if you and all your friends are supportive of each other then you're more likely to succeed when compared to the rest of the class. This does have the opposite effect of making it harder for students that don't have the same support/study groups but it goes completely against the point you're trying to make.
The most important advice is at the end.
> Undergrads tend to have tunnel vision about their classes. They want to get good grades, etc. The crucial fact to realize is that noone will care about your grades, unless they are bad. For example, I always used to say that the smartest student will get 85% in all of his courses. This way, you end up with somewhere around 4.0 score, but you did not over-study, and you did not under-study.
It’s difficult to escape tunnel vision when your most urgent and highest priority task tends to be the required homework and studying you have right in front of you, and you directly get feedback on that work.
> Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck.
I agree with all the advice here, but in hindsight, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this. These things are all something you can do away from school, so while in school, it felt like a waste to not make use of the school to do things on my own.
Overall the advice is much easier said than done, even if it is something I completely agree with.
> I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this
I think back to my college years (2002-2006) and I don't recall being very receptive to explicit advice even if it was realistically applicable. Even given everything I know about myself now, I struggle to imagine how I could have persuaded my 20-year-old self to do anything with words alone.
In university, how can you get a 4.0 with an 85% average? In high school they added 1.0 to honors courses but I don’t remember the same thing happening in undergrad.
Grade inflation is common at many schools. And many difficult technical classes grade on a curve, sometimes to the point where you can get an A with an 85%.
But yeah, I still don't see how an 85% average would be a 4.0.
I never visited my professors or TAs during office hours. In retrospect, I see I missed free one-on-ones, not only to ask about assignments or tests, but also to talk about the big pictures, misunderstandings, etc, etc.
I spent few semesters of college sober, mostly just coasting through intro-level courses on my way to grad school. But it was magical when I actually cared about a subject / instructor, and got to know them during group study sessions / office hours. I learnt physical chemistry from one of the co-inventors of white LED — the baddest bitch in that college town (she did not gifeAF about anything but her own incredible inventions). Her equally-brilliant husband was my academic advisor (but you would never suspect they're married) =P
Our alumni network sends out a quarterly academic publication, and it's always nice to see how certain former peers/instructors "panned out" — e.g. a former classmate is now a nobel laureate (mutually-unknown, but I supported his team's hardware as a student job). My favorite are former TAs from my introductory labs that are now running their own quirky laboratories (many of us smoked.erryday.homies, at least at the time..).
It was only a decade after grad school that I realized how important people / networking can be. I am not a typical graduate, but "go Dores."
> Study very intensely RIGHT before the test.
I was always told NOT to study right before the test because it hinder retrieval of long term memory.
If the origin of that was a single study, you should learn about then replication crisis in psychology that called into question large swaths of results, after around 2/3rds of studies failed replication.
Both this advice and whatever the OP recommends are both subject to the “replication crisis” critique. At least until you dig in and become confident in the reliability of the research backing the claims. No research is cited in this article. Some of the advice seems unlikely to be research-based (“drink coffee 2 hours before the exam but not right before”).
Chalk it up to youth perhaps, but this piece would benefit, in my view, from more "for me..." or "I found..." and less "You should/must/are..."
I have reached a point in my life in which I recognize that I do not generally appreciate direct advice, especially not the unsolicited variety. Even the bits that I agree with in this piece are tainted by the many cases where I did the exact opposite of what he advises and excelled academically.
> Having been tested for many years of my life (with pretty good results), here are some rules of thumb that I feel helped me
Oh, come now, I think Karpathy adequately qualifies his advice. :-)
I had to study for significantly longer than 6 days to barely scrape a 2:1 in my degree. Perhaps I hadn’t optimised my caffeine consumption.
I find really helpful writing down by hand the key concepts or phrases I find impactful. Also I draw a lot of pictures to fix the stuff and link it with arrows to show the line of thought
While Andrej's advice may offer useful tips, it's important to consider that success strategies can vary significantly among individuals. What works for one person might not work for another due to different learning styles, backgrounds, and circumstances. Additionally, the educational landscape has evolved since 2013, so some advice may be outdated. Always critically evaluate any guidance and adapt it to your personal situation.
That has been said more than once - but research fails to back it up in general. You are not that different from others.
I love the final point:
>Your time is a precious, limited resource. Get to a point where you don't screw up on a test and then switch your attention to much more important endeavors. [...] Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck.
While probably 90% of undergrads undershoot in terms of time spent on their courses, the other 10% "Goodhardt" their grades and misallocate their time and abilities.
So many “hot takes” about studying but really it comes down to 1 thing: Are you disciplined enough to have an excellent time management.
That’s basically it.
Paraphrasing a saying that is popular among coaches:
Everyone has the desire to win but very few have the will to prepare to win.
Doing well in school is overwhelmingly about simply having the will to do the work. To read, listen, take notes, study, practice, and review. There's no magic.
" Study well in advance. Did I mention this already? Maybe I should stress it again. The brain really needs time to absorb material. Things that looked hard become easier with time. You want to alocate ~3 days for midterms, ~6 days for exams. "
Are you kidding? Don't expect to pass the calculus 3 exam I took as a Physics Engineer at Politecnico di Milano with less that one month (keep in mind: bare minimum) of studying ahead of the exam (lectures not included): If you could actually get good grades with what Andrej said, I totally chose the wrong university.
In my physics group in Cambridge there was one student who was way better than the rest of us at physics although only normally bright at stuff outside of physics and the thing that was different about her was her dad was a physics prof and she was probably exposed to the advanced ideas a kid. I think in the same way kids pick up languages more easily than adults they may pick up other intellectual stuff.
It matters what topics are taught in elementary school, and how they are taught. We as society need to figure out what is going to be important in 40 years (when current kids are 45-50 years old) and ensure those things are started so they slowly have time to get the concepts.
I can be reasonably confident that logical thinking will be important, which you can get from Math (philosophy also has logic - is that useful too? My background is math so I don't know about that side). I'm sure other parts of math will be useful but not what. The BASIC I learned in school was worthless (it would have been useful as an introduction if my teachers didn't teach/test so many "facts" that were wrong - I was too shy to tell them that back then and now I'm mature enough to know I'd get in trouble without changing anything so there was no point)
Studying the old tests should be even higher up. A lazy prof will reuse quite a bit of their test material after a decade or two.
Good advice except for recommending cramming before a test or chugging coffee/energy drink. Those can backfire.
> All-nighters are not worth it.
I disagree. I made some of my best friends through all nighters and continue to occasionally pull them because they reinvigorate meaning into my work as they did my coursework.
If your only metric for success in school is your GPA, then yes all nighters aren’t worth it. But climbing a metric leaderboard isn’t the only measure of doing well in a course.
It is curious because Andrej recognizes this with his comments concerning coffee.
Occasional all-nighters can be fun. We even did them at work back in the dotcom days. I wouldn't do them now, because they don't really accomplish anything. But they can be fun.
This is an article about doing well in courses, not in making friends
Making friends is one of the most important reasons to go to college. Friends from that era of my life later hired me into excellent jobs that changed my generational wealth. About half of my friends met their life partners during college. Several of my lifelong best friends are people I met through college friends and activities.
The more career-minded might call it "networking".
Nevertheless, the article is specifically about doing well in courses.
The course I did best at in school was the one that led to a job opportunity through some friends I made.
Why do friends need to be made through all-nighters? Could you have made the same friends by organizing study groups during regular hours, and then doing something else fun with those people in the evenings?
They don't have to be, nor am I claiming that all nighters are unilaterally positive. But they were an integral part of my college experience and many of my friends' and I enjoyed them in a type 2 fun kind of way.
Asserting that they're not worth it misses the broader picture.
Like in army training, shared suffering helps comradery.
Some good advice, but two of the pieces surprised me:
> Go to the prof before final exam at least once for office hours. - Even if you have no questions (make something up!) Profs will sometimes be willing to say more about a test in 1on1 basis (things they would not disclose in front of the entire class). Don't expect it, but when this does happen, it helps a lot. Does this give you an unfair advantage over other students? Sometimes. It's a little shady :) But in general it is a good idea to let the prof get to know you at least a little.
Were I a professor, and a student showed up to my office hours, to disingenuous BS me (e.g., making something up to get face time to advance their sociopath career, or to try to get exclusive hints on the exam), that would not be to their advantage.
ProTip: I wouldn't be thinking "What a wonderfully go-getter young person; I should write them a good recommendation, to help them gain more influence. Stanford hasn't inflicted nearly enough people like this upon the world."
> If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, jug an energy drink. - They work. It's just chemistry.*
Half of the students are already drugged to the gills. Students don't need celebrity alum endorsement of that.
You don't want people graduading as drugged-out zombies and narcissists, to then go on to found or lead sociopathic companies that make society worse.
I never did that in college because it seemed awfully manipulative to bother them unless I really needed it. It didn't even occur to me that that's what other people had been doing until I had almost graduated.
Being a student to me just really warps your perspective on the world because it confines you into such an arbitrary, stressful, gameable system that you either adapt to it and come out of it with a very flawed model of reality, reject it at your own peril, or suffer through it. I would rather get a B than transparently work my professor for an A- and it's concerning to think that the people who go on to become doctors and management consultants are disproportionately the ones who do that.
If someone can't figure out how to take advantage of widely available stimulants, it's a dramatic disadvantage in frankly all facets of life. There's no prize for deliberately hampering yourself by refusing to use the tools available to you.
> sociopath career
If someone's seems obviously a sociopath from a single innocuous interaction, they're probably not a real sociopath. I'm not sure what the litmus test is for a "made-up" question vs. a genuine question based on the course material; the only difference is whether the student already knows the answer.
I think we're a bit too eager to throw around "sociopath." When I nod along to my boss' vacation story and ask him follow-up questions, I guess that also makes me a sociopath, because he's not a good storyteller and I'm not interested in Machu Picchu (this is a made up anecdote for illustrative purposes).
Were you a professor you might also be a bit more sympathetic to the pressure academia puts on students to make them suck up like this.
> Half of the students are already drugged to the gills.
He did advocate ample sleep and not pulling all-nighters, near the top of the article.
Not sociopaths, but sociopathic careers, as a term of condemnation.
And a lot of people light up the BS detector like they wouldn't believe.
Loosely put, the majority of them fit the stereotype who think that everyone is ruthlessly self-interested, but they don't think of it as ruthless, and they think of themselves and the others as (in Bay Area stereotype, for example) nice and cheerful and progressive. Their vague awareness not to be crass about it, according to the social conventions they've gotten in their peer groups thus far, is insufficient to hide it.
But others of them think they are "the alpha", and believe themselves to be more aggressive than others, and more meritorious. Yet, of the ones I've noticed (and this might be why I noticed them), they're not as smart as they think they are, when they try to manipulate, and don't know how to fake being someone they aren't. They instead lean on family money and connections, alliances with power structures, gaming, underhandedness, aggressiveness, etc.
Though I knew one very smart and very charismatic ruthless person, who was smart enough to avoid the tells, so I know they exist. One way of describing it is that they could play parts of different personalities, thinking of things the personality would think of, as needed for different audiences. Once they started tipping their hand, it was too late to stop them, and society is significantly worse for it. I speculate that these people are a very small minority, because I think otherwise they would have taken over more positions of power. Yet we can see that many powerful tech companies are headed by people who obviously do not have these qualities of brains, charisma, and empathy. Maybe the non-ruthless ones become great writers, actors, and teachers instead.
“Don't only hang out only with stronger students. Weaker students will have you explain things to them and you will find that teaching the material helps A LOT with understanding.”
This guy really understands the human mind
I love metacognitive approaches to learning- much more interesting for people like me who get bored by the actual material pretty quickly
Title could also be “How to train biological neural networks” - Andrej Karpathy
Lots of good advice in this article.
My favorite pieces that I agree with 100%:
> Reading and understanding IS NOT the same as replicating the content.
This happens to me all the time. It's really important to try and replicate everything that you learn. I would go even further and constantly reaffirm that you still know how to prove facts that you take for granted.
> NEVER. EVER. EVER. Leave a test early.
Every time I find a mistake.
Some pieces that I really disagree with:
> Study very intensely RIGHT before the test.
I don't think this works, at least for me, it doesn’t. I never studied on test day unless the test was in the evening. Even in cases where I had ample time to study, I focused on preparing for my later tests. By the time test day rolls around, you either know the material or you don’t. I don’t think short-term memory is as valuable as the writer is making it out to be. I also worry that the added stress may cause you to confuse yourself when trying to frantically read through your notes or textbooks.
> If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, chug an energy drink.
Your health is more important than the tests you take. These energy drinks are terrible for you and your brain, in my opinion. After hours of sitting, drinking such a high concentration of sugar and caffeine is terrible for you. Just go out for a walk, take a shower, and if that doesn't help, go to sleep. Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.
> Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.
This strongly depends on what stage of the studying/cramming process you are on. If the option is between going over everything a third time, or going to bed, go to bed. If you've never successfully completed a problem in a certain part of the subject? Getting there will almost certainly be more valuable than the trade-off in sleep. No amount of sleep is going to fill holes in your knowledge.
> Study very intensely RIGHT before the test.
Yeah, I don't think this works because I think short-term memory is unreliable under pressure and our brain usually absorb things during sleep.
> Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.
I think the trade-off of being a little jittery and possibly scoring better on an exam is probably worth it. Unless you turn it into a habit, a few hours short on sleep a month isn't going to measurably harm you. Then again, it depends on how much you stand to gain from studying those extra few hours - and it's equally important to be realistic on that quantity.
> NEVER. EVER. EVER. Leave a test early.
It has been nearly 20 years, but my rule of thumb was that I wouldn't leave until I had done *three* review passes of the test. That is, quadruple checking, completing the exam and then reviewing my answers three times. That is pretty far into the diminishing returns for me catching my own errors.
That *almost* never happens, but there are exceptions -- sometimes they really do give way way more time than you need, especially if you are already strong at the material in question.
With that said, the key point is that the time tradeoff here for leaving early is terrible in typical college classes that have heavy weight on exams. Especially the first 10 -20 minutes of double checking is very likely worth 5+ hours of homework time or study time in terms of points towards the grade.
I left a test early once and my TA made it a point to tear my answers apart.
This doesn't have a date but I checked the wayback machine and it was first crawled in April 2013. [1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130404071259/https://cs.stanfo...
> Places with a lot of background noise are bad and have a research-supported negative impact on learning. Libraries and Reading rooms work best.
This was horrible advice for me and caused my a lot of grief for many years wondering why I still couldn't focus.
Nothing against Andrej, part of the reason I hate this advice is that this is very common advice for what your environment should look like. This was advice given by study workshops at my college. I'm sure this works for a decent chunk of the student population.
Quiet places cause me to mentally drift into outer space and I just zone out.
You know what is a great environment? Semi-busy coffee shops + headphones + instrumental music. I'm able to consistently lock in for 4-5 hours. When I go back to my "nice quiet home environment" I get distracted immediately and refocusing is super hard.
Like I said, this is standard advice that works for a portion of the population, but I think this makes a ton of other people in the same boat as me feel lazy/discouraged/unfocused/stupid losers when in reality "nice quiet places" might not work for them.
My tip is if you're doing well in courses, ratchet it up with more challenging courses maybe outside of your major or take some proof heavy graduate courses (if in compsci/math).
If you have it in you, none of this will matter, you will find your path anyway.
If you dont have it in you, none of this will matter, you will not be able to do it anyway.
Great find. What was he teaching back then?
Not sure about 2013 but in 2016 he taught this gem of a class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfnWJUyUJYU&list=PLkt2uSq6rB...
I can't pay attention during lectures. Not "this is difficult" but "I cannot keep the sentence being spoken in memory long enough to understand it". They speak too slowly and take large pauses while writing.
I have found no solution for this besides watching recordings at a significantly faster speed, preferably clipping silences.
I have been tested and found explicit evidence of this short term memory deficiency which healthcare providers directly refused to address instead offering childish advice about sleep and self care offering SSRIs as well.
The real truth is that the good advice has always been dispensed, it's just that students don't want to listen.
1. Follow actively the lessons.
2. Study and exercise every day what you covered in the previous lessons
Every one of us has been given these age old platitudes, but, as spaced repetition, testing, and active recall prove, they are actually an excellent starting point for good performance
The problems were more obvious to me when I was older and trying to mentor college students.
Some of them just got it, absorbed good advice like a sponge, rejected bad advice, and did their best. They were unsurprisingly successful in life (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary)
The most frustrating cases were the students who got baited by angry internet advice. Reddit was a frequent source of bad advice. Some got pulled into 4Chan or Something Awful (depending on the era). Others were in weird IRC channels or Discords. All of them got poisoned by cynical online junk. I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway.
The hardest type for me to mentor were the students who had a bottomless bucket of excuses to pull from for everything in their life. Nothing was ever their fault, even if their failure was unambiguously traceable back to their lack of studying. It was always the fault of their professor, their roommate, their parents, their students, their friends, or even their mentors (me) because they had trained themselves to find someone or something to blame in every situation. Not surprisingly they were always failing to progress in life until they hit some situation that forced self-reflection and learning. Some of them managed to turn it around, but I can still find many of them angrily ranting into LinkedIn or other social media to this day.
Mentoring was hard. It was rewarding to work with the students who wanted to learn and knew how to prefer good advice over bad. For some it felt like most of the battle was just keeping them away from bad influences and resisting the urge to run to Reddit to find something that helped them believe nothing was their fault.
> (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary)
> I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway.
To be fair, it does seem to be pretty bad out there if your only definition of success is monetary.
But your general point about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control absolutely is well taken.
The problem with cynicism and seeing everything as bullshit and unfair is that it's self-reinforcing. I used to wallow in that too because it was the only way to make sense of the world, because I just was not very happy and couldn't see what I would be able to do to change that.
Once I graduated from college and started working that completely changed for me, because I finally for the first time had some semblance of agency and real stakes in my life, and wasn't forced to spend all my time with other people my age who were just as lacking in real perspective and experience. Someone gave me real responsibility over something actually pretty important, I could speak up and do and change things in ways that weren't explicitly decided for me ahead of time, it wasn't all just a game anymore.
Being a student is essentially modeled as a zero-sum audition for the real world that is simultaneously extremely low stakes (nobody else really cares about what you're doing) and high stakes (if you fail you could seriously harm your future life). You live completely at the whim of institutions with deadlines and gameable processes. The students who seemed legitimately happy to me were either the ones who didn't feel the same kind of pressure to succeed or those who legitimately found it meaningful to participate in school clubs and work professors for higher grades (go to all their office hours to get help with homework, argue for higher grades). Of course there was fun to be had too but the entire environment is engineered for cynicism, it forces you into a ghetto of inexperience and helplessness.
That is not to say that cynicism is good, and obviously the students who used it as an excuse not to learn or take accountability for their own actions or lack thereof were seriously harming themselves. But I do not think it is entirely irrational, given their perspective of the world as one in which they have very little agency and the rules are almost all artificial, to perceive it that way.
For two years I wrote notes in class on yellow legal pad. After class, I rewrote into a spiral notebook, one for each class. That way I only carried a legal pad to each class everyday.
Not surprisingly, my grades those two years were great. Never had the fortitude to keep it up.
Strange, I would have thought that a habit successfully kept for two years (or even considerably less than that) might as well be permanent.
> 1. Follow actively the lessons.
It sounds obvious, but I wonder if this works for everyone. I've always had a very hard time to follow lessons (I studied maths then CS), but did work hard on the side and ultimately did quite well at tests and national exams.
I think the lecture format didn't work well for me, and I would have been better off with the just material, and access to a professor for questions.
They told us which chapters to read before each lecture, nobody else that I knew did it. I did. It was super helpful.
I suspect the reason is that most late-teens/early-twenty-somethings are not responsible/emotionally mature enough to put in the required amount of work in the relatively free environment of university where nobody is checking if you’re doing your homework or show up to class.
Related, for me, was that high school just wasn't very challenging. I got As without ever really studying or feeling that I was working very hard. I took that approach into university and it worked for my freshman and most of my sophomore courses. Then things got actually tough and I realized I could not just intuit my way through exams, and I had never really learned how to study.
Failing to realise that school was just about learning how to learn was also the main mistake I made, for the same reason as you. I was always good at soaking up stuff I found interesting, but to this day learning something because I have to is hard, awful work.
Every undergraduate student I met over the age of 22 was much, much better than their young counterparts within the same ability cohort.
I've read that the highest levels of brain development are not complete until about age 25.
Unfortunately this is a pop-sci myth similar to the "you only use 10% of your brain" myth.
Yeah, it's like most people know exercise is good for body. But good luck my rational mind getting me to the gym on most days
That said I do think even the seemingly obvious need to be repeated often because the audience keeps changing. So it is _new_ for someone, it may change someone's perspective
Some more advice:
Tests are all bullshit. They are just some arbitrary questions, trying to figure out whether you understood the material, which were made up by some guy who has much more important things to do.
If you want to spend your time well, either do networking or try to understand the material. If you are there trying to game the system (which hilariously Karpathy is suggesting you do, in a very mild way) then you should seriously consider why you are there in the first place.
Also consider that when you are tested outside of school you will always be tested to face to face.
Yep, and they are often scaled by the "Normal Curve". The catch with this flawed reasoning is that a Normal Distribution requires multiple independent imputs where none is deterministic. Having a professor and a curriculum are together goes against that proposition. There needs to be a better distribution to measure varation within an effective teaching method. Teaching towards a normal distributon result favors giving tests with flawed grading and other bad practices. In the late 1980s I didn't want to pursue a PHD due to the bleak future of acedemia, but if I had this would have been a major focus as it is causing a myriad of problems in our society abusing higher eduction students in this way.
The second half of this explains why he suggests gaming it, and seems to boil down to Grant Allen's maxim of "Don't let your schooling interfere with your education"
My tests were always tricky variations on a problem, or the exact problem, which they completely solved in the TA sessions.
I couldn’t figure out why I got the first B’s and C’s of my life until I realized that.
Mxm
I don't miss university at all. In hindsight most of it was a scam and I learnt most things on my own either by opening a book, starting my own project or through research.
You don't need a 50 point list to learn anything even to a proficient level. Exams are bullshit.
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How am I meant to take this clown's advice seriously when he's the guy who invented vibe coding? Probably has been a net negative for students.
To me it seems Andrej Karpathy is like the new AI guru. In this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329 he predicted the future of AI a decade ahead. Do not get me wrong, I do think he is very knowledgable on the subject.
Is guru being used in some special sense here? Cuz Karpathy has been an AI luminary for at least 10 years. This post for instance taught RL to a whole generation https://karpathy.github.io/2016/05/31/rl/.
I think he means Guru in the sense of crystal ball Guru telling you the future.
Ah, the thin font inspired by Apple's iOS 7 Helvetica font that ruined the readability of web content for a decade...
Is there a way to enforce non-thin fonts on web pages in the browser?
DarkReader plugin has settings to manipulate fonts on pages, it's quite easy to configure.
Assuming you are already using dark reader to give dark mode to all pages.
I use reader mode when typography sucks.