[HN Gopher] Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for succ...
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Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)
Author : peterkshultz
Score : 313 points
Date : 2025-10-19 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cs.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (cs.stanford.edu)
| mhog_hn wrote:
| Title could also be "How to train biological neural networks" -
| Andrej Karpathy
| logicallee wrote:
| 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...
| random9749832 wrote:
| 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.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| 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 :)
| epolanski wrote:
| 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.
| constantcrying wrote:
| 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.
| b33j0r wrote:
| 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.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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"
| nomilk wrote:
| Great find. What was he teaching back then?
| levocardia wrote:
| Not sure about 2013 but in 2016 he taught this gem of a class:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfnWJUyUJYU&list=PLkt2uSq6rB...
| behnamoh wrote:
| 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?
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| I use reader mode when typography sucks.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| 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.
| brosco wrote:
| 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.
| random9749832 wrote:
| 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.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| 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.
| billy99k wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| 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...
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Yak-shaving.
| brosco wrote:
| 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.
| quacked wrote:
| 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.
| random9749832 wrote:
| 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.
| quacked wrote:
| 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.
| random9749832 wrote:
| You missed the keyword "mostly".
| xmprt wrote:
| 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.
| random9749832 wrote:
| 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.
| billy99k wrote:
| 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.
| fn-mote wrote:
| 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.
| leobg wrote:
| 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.
| normie3000 wrote:
| > To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of
| a detective novel, you must have...
|
| Wait, can people do this??
| eastbound wrote:
| It's usually none of the people you can think about
| (otherwise it's a very bad plot).
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| 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.
| chongli wrote:
| 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!
| ebertucc wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| Required for success at games like Jeopardy. Guess the answer
| before you read the whole thing
| momo_O wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| gretch wrote:
| 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.
| loupol wrote:
| I take it you are not a member of the Church of
| Interruption[0] then.
|
| https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html
| chongli wrote:
| 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.
| vector_spaces wrote:
| 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
| chongli wrote:
| 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.
| fn-mote wrote:
| 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?
| chongli wrote:
| 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.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| 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.
| whatever1 wrote:
| 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.
| shripadt wrote:
| 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."
| nsagent wrote:
| 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.
| levocardia wrote:
| 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.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| 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
| sfn42 wrote:
| They told us which chapters to read before each lecture, nobody
| else that I knew did it. I did. It was super helpful.
| ido wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| 9dev wrote:
| 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.
| quacked wrote:
| Every undergraduate student I met over the age of 22 was
| much, much better than their young counterparts within the
| same ability cohort.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I've read that the highest levels of brain development
| are not complete until about age 25.
| Jach wrote:
| Unfortunately this is a pop-sci myth similar to the "you
| only use 10% of your brain" myth.
| chrisgd wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| Strange, I would have thought that a habit successfully kept
| for two years (or even considerably less than that) might as
| well be permanent.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| > (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.
| weitendorf wrote:
| 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.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > 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.
| jatins wrote:
| 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
| Fraaaank wrote:
| > 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.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| 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.
| joshvm wrote:
| 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%.
| airstrike wrote:
| I don't think I'll ever understand/accept the idea of curving
| grades.
| buildbot wrote:
| 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?)
| airstrike wrote:
| Even in that case it doesn't make sense. Why should the
| underperforming cohort be rewarded for doing poorly?
| britzkopf wrote:
| 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.
| xmprt wrote:
| 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.
| storus wrote:
| 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.
| m-ee wrote:
| I went to Stanford and that was absolutely not the case. I
| once got an A on a midterm with a 65%
| storus wrote:
| What I mentioned was the case in some hard CS classes I
| took there.
| epolanski wrote:
| This posts sums up everything that's wrong with grading and
| modern colleges.
| jocaal wrote:
| 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.
| alyxya wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| 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.
| jackling wrote:
| 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.
| sodality2 wrote:
| > 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.
| mentos wrote:
| I left a test early once and my TA made it a point to tear my
| answers apart.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| > 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.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| This is an article about doing well in courses, not in making
| friends
| kevmo314 wrote:
| The course I did best at in school was the one that led to a
| job opportunity through some friends I made.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| 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".
| orev wrote:
| 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?
| kevmo314 wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| downboots wrote:
| Good advice except for recommending cramming before a test or
| chugging coffee/energy drink. Those can backfire.
| didip wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| randomtoast wrote:
| 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.
| tehnub wrote:
| 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/.
| tuhgdetzhh wrote:
| I think he means Guru in the sense of crystal ball Guru
| telling you the future.
| jokellum wrote:
| > 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.
| stared wrote:
| 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.
| marcodiego wrote:
| 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.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| 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).
| tehnub wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| dbacar wrote:
| 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.
| expenses3 wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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.
| preett_y wrote:
| Mxm
| acetofenone wrote:
| 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
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| Cpoll wrote:
| > 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.
| weitendorf wrote:
| 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.
| commandersaki wrote:
| 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).
| dsamy wrote:
| 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.
| zer0zzz wrote:
| "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
| foofoo12 wrote:
| > 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.
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