Title could also be “How to train biological neural networks” - Andrej Karpathy
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130404071259/https://cs.stanfo...
You don't need a 50 point list to learn anything even to a proficient level. Exams are bullshit.
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 :)
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.
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.
>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.
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
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%.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Assuming you are already using dark reader to give dark mode to all pages.
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.
But yeah within a single assignment it makes no sense to force a specific distribution. (People do this maybe because they don’t understand?)
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.
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.
Asserting that they're not worth it misses the broader picture.
And when I say learning, I mean understanding the material, not just remembering a bunch of information for an exam.
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.
There being 100 different ways to learn though is questionable.
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.
Not surprisingly, my grades those two years were great. Never had the fortitude to keep it up.
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.
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.
Wait, can people do this??
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'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 more career-minded might call it "networking".
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
Chalk and board is the way.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Agreed but i also think it should be focused on much earlier as well.
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.
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.
- 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"
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.
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
Unfortunately Zoom is 1/N-duplex, which ruins it for everyone.
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.
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.
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.
(And you will also learn to read between the lines e.g. "Our resulst are PROMISING..." = there is much space for improvement etc.)
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
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
But yeah, I still don't see how an 85% average would be a 4.0.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
(apologies in advance to those who wish to attract the same sex; I assume it works there too).
> 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 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)
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.
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."
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.
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.
But that is worse than just listening and doing that in your head, so people who already listens the right way the note taking gets in the way, writing things down is strictly inferior if you know how to listen since it adds an unneeded extra step.
I never wrote things down in lectures and I could ace the math exams without studying more because I listened to the lectures. None of the people who took notes could do that, and neither could I the times I tried to take notes.
The ultimate goal is knowledge cultivation.
You're more adapt to intellectual work only if you actually cultivate knowledge.
If all this college circus is, farming grades, then universities are ultimately failing at their job.
Also note that GPA isn't just for jobs. Applying for school post bachelor's cares the most about a GPA. So a bad grade but learning a lot on a rigorous course can still male it hard to progress as a researcher or any other kind of specialized knowledge seeker.
You’re also ignoring the human element of grading particularly in subjective parts of an exam.
If job prospects are the focus then we should invest in proper trade schools detached from universities that focus on teaching marketable skills.
This is a thing in countries like Germany. My uncle works in maintenance of nuclear reactors there and he went through a trade school that focused on learning the relevant parts of the job.
> TESTS: ON DAY OF
> Study very intensely RIGHT before the test.
> DURING THE TEST
I have one other hack, really helpful and fully legal: As soon as the test starts, do a braindump onto scrap paper, especially the items just crammed beforehand. That effectively produces a cheat sheet, which is easiest to do when the information is freshest.
Also, as fatigue sets in, it is harder to recall lots of facts, so doing a braindump as the very first task was a big win for me.
This is a very helpful way to look at it. Thanks for writing it out.
One of the biggest potential benefits of mentoring programs is that it can expose students to the real world outside of their academic bubble. The hard part for me is trying to break into their bubble and explain that there's more to the world than the mental model they pieced together from snarky Reddit posts. It can be difficult.
Looking at the slides no longer build enough context for you to learn and catchup on what you have missed, so in the end every lecture is unskippable.
I found those moments really valuable if course-correcting was non-trivial -- the typical Definition-Theorem-Proof-Example format certainly is essential for organizing one's thinking and communicating new math in a way that's digestible to other mathematicians, but it is not how mathematicians actually think about math or solve novel problems
In the grad analysis sequence this "course correcting" mechanic was built into the course, since we were required to regularly solve a challenging problem and then present its proof to the class and withstand intense questioning from both the professor and peers. If you caught an error in someone's proof and could help the presenter arrive at a correct proof, you'd both earn points.
The thrill of surviving an incredulous "Wait a second..." from that particular professor (who later became my research advisor) was hard to beat
Anyway my intent was to analogize math lectures (whatever they might look like) with language courses or immersion in the sense that they are an opportunity to practice speaking and listening, and to immerse yourself in cultural norms. I think it goes a bit deeper than this, in that language is inextricably connected to most thought and vice versa -- we experience this in a very explicit way whenever we find our thinking clarified in the process of formulating a question, but it's always there
That said, pure immersion for language learning is actually easy to beat -- lots of research shows that immersion together with explicit grammar instruction has far better learning outcomes than immersion alone. Immersion alone misses lots of nuance -- and it relies on the speaker being acutely aware of the difference between their output and target forms.
With your verb conjugation example, lots of time can be saved by knowing that there's a thing called the subjunctive and that it is distinct from tense and it shows up in a myriad of places tending to concern hypotheticals
Similarly, I gain a lot from talking to mathematicians and attending conferences. But I also need to spend time alone consulting relevant theory, reading papers, and playing with examples. Both are important, but in math it seems you one get away with less immersion