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Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

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Re: Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

#91

Regardless of intelligence you clearly have the one thing that actually matters: Determination and resilience. Seriously. Study after study has shown that the thing that matters most is resilience. The ability to push forward saying "I AM CAPABLE!". https://medium.com/@ocarolinestokes/resilience-is-the-underl... You clearly have that. Keep pushing on. A counterpoint is that i have friends with PHDs who've never actua…

Resilience beats talent 100% of the time.

Absolutely. Some of the best engineers I have hired have been of modest talent but had tons of grit. They run circles around their more talented but aimless peers.

And if you have both talent and resilience, you’ve got a proper superpower.

Re: Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

#92
post #89

School (and Uni) are designed to train you to become academics. So naturally, anyone aspiring to be other than that, will be screwed to various degree. I'm a certified genius. A member of Mensa. But I never do well in school. I do train myself to have the following attitudes : grit, honesty, initiative (note: different than assertive), be a helpful (friendly) person. People consider me to be a rather successful perso…

bruv, Mensa tests don’t indicate nothing

Re: Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

#93

Yep! C to B student in high school, granted, taking the tougher classes. Got better grades in college (Which I got into mainly because I scored well on the SAT and applied as a music major, then switched immediately after), and graduated with a (in hindsight) bullshit degree in applied science. ~5 years after college, I learned to code, and it's been a passion since. 7 years after college, I started a path I am still…

If you really want to learn functional programming you can take a look at How to Design Programs. It is free online.

https://htdp.org/

Re: Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

#94
In college, I had two particular roommates who both had exemplary academic records in STEM / CS fields on paper, yet embodied two different extremes. I think of them often while pondering my own tortured academic path.

The first was among the most brilliant people I've ever met. Sure, this person was a full-ride honor student with straight As all around, but they never found the challenge they needed, even when sitting in on grad-level classes for fun. They hardly ever studied, spent most of their time playing video games, exclusively took classes in their areas of interest, and transferred to another school when those classes ran out. Repeat for at least three colleges, taking over a decade to finally cave in and fulfill their undergrad requirements. Then after school, their career never really took off.

The second was, to put it politely, not the sharpest tool in the shed. They studied furiously to master material that seemed trivial, and whenever I tried to discuss advanced topics with them, they were completely lost. But they worked hard, harder than anyone else I knew, to maintain a perfect GPA. Went on to have a very successful career.

I suppose I bring them up to point out that even academic success doesn't paint a full picture.

My own academic performance in college was wildly inconsistent. Started off with scholarships, Dean's list, etc., then plunged into failures and academic warnings (barely avoided probation). I recovered, hit Dean's list again, and then back into failure mode. Then another last string of As during my senior-level courses brought me back into a low 3.x GPA at graduation. Regardless of the recoveries, damage was done, costing me intern opportunities that might have helped out a bit when graduating into a recession.

Depending on my mood, I could place the blame for my failures on a lot of things. A few different medical conditions ultimately requiring surgeries and months of prescribed opiates. Lack of parental support. Depression preceding my downturns. Undiagnosed (at the time) ADHD. But in retrospect, I also could have been smarter in how I dealt with all those things instead of embracing the self-destructive aspects.

Re: Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

#95

I teach part time at the university level (I am not going to say where). I would love to give you my perspective on this as I see a lot of non-neurotypical students. Some of these students do well in an academic environment; some don't - and to generalize this across schools; some schools have a more regularized population and select for this. Similarly, others accommodate more for these types of things versus school…

I would say just be a little bit cautious of the "what's your superpower" thing because it can imply effortless success if not delivered carefully. I've seen many people try something to a very superficial degree "oh that's clearly not for me". This is particularly frustrating dealing with people who haven't yet found their path but clearly have potential. They keep looking for something they can somehow do naturally…

I appreciate you bringing this up. I myself suffered from this type of thinking: "if I am struggling with something, that must mean I am not good at it, and shouldn't waste time on it". The idea that you need to struggle a bit, get better at things little by little, look at how much progress you've making over time and then decide whether it's for you or not I think is much healthier thinking

Re: Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

#96
> I've never been the kind of A type personality ...

That's a poor way of characterizing the issue. I think you should look more closely at why you haven't done well instead of internalizing that you are just not the right type of personality.

> I've been told I have ADHD

A lot of heavy metal poisoning is often mistaken or misdiagnosed for spectrum disorders. Its hard to test for chronic poisoning because you have to take a chelator which causes acute poisoning to even test for it. Having been labelled in this category often is a disadvantage because structure is incredibly important for people on the spectrum but you can ask for certain accommodations and they are required to give them if you have a diagnosis.

> told I won't be receiving a CS degree ... because my grades weren't good enough for entry.

You have not said where you are located, but if its anywhere in the US this is par for the course. Its important to recognize the reasons for the failures and place blame where it actually belongs.

Many times in US based curricula, the student is set up to fail, and by that I mean in any other industry if the same practices were followed it would be fraud and they'd be found liable. That being said, sometimes it is because you have repeated personal failures and not addressed them, but this latter aspect is in the minority.

What I'd suggest is re-examining your failures, and identify exactly what caused them with a objective view, and what if anything you can do to fix them.

Start with examining what any student needs to control basic academic outcomes, and whether those requirements were met for the classes you took.

When setting up your schedule, were the classes appropriately advertised based on the amount of time they require for pass. Classes are rated by unit hours, if the college recognizes a 12-unit course as a full load, divide 40 hours by 12 and you've got the max number of hours any class should require (per week per unit) in coursework for the 16 or 12 week period. You cannot expect your best work if one or multiple classes exceed this since you'd be exceeding safe limits for any professional job. No one does well when something requires 60+ hours of work a week for an extended period of time. This can actually send people to the hospital. If its above 40, they have not provided the necessary control over basic academic outcomes.

Additionally, structure of the course is important. There are systems properties that are necessary for any test/exam to be valid, or have a valid inferential basis; these properties are normally covered in an EE class; take an overview look at the properties from MIT OCWs videos. You may need to look at the book but its cheap and well worth having. Don't worry about the math, look at what the properties are, how they are defined and tested.

The professor may have removed or added properties (without understanding this rigorous approach) to limit the people who pass, or fail people. They may do this for any arbitrary reason.

This is often seen in non-deterministic questions being asked on tests without a basis for inference. An example might be a multiple choice question with 3 or more actually correct answers to choose from (breaks determinism and inference).

Causality spirals are specifically designed to fail people. An example of these is the classic 3 question test which I've seen numerous times in engineering tracks, where the 2nd question requires the correct answer from the 1st question, and the 3rd question requires the correct answer to the second question. Classes that use these often have two main tests, which don't occur until you can no longer receive a refund.

Ultimately they amount to the whole grade, and you can only get 1 question wrong out of the two last question on either test and still pass.

Additionally, there may be other dirty tactics that further optimize for failure. An online grader may randomize each individual students question pool. If there is a problem with the questions, the professor may not take action for a question that other students didn't get, there is no clear signal to them that something is wrong with the test and they didn't vet the question pool.

Online material and graders may mark correct answers as incorrect, and have subtle dark patterns embedded to induce failure spirals. They may not provide a means to report problems to the professor. This is done by not providing a button, and the dark patterns may have text on a red background that pops up with each incorrect answer after every question. Its the opposite pattern for dopamine loops which are embedded into games as addiction triggers, only this is a frustration trigger. It does this when the question was answered correctly, you get no popup when its correct, you get a red popup when its incorrect. Its subtle, but after 4 or 5 times of this happening, you can't concentrate because its futile, and that applies to a broad set of the population. Its known pedagogical circles that this causes poor outcomes, there was a classic psychology experiment where this was tested by telling the teacher a particular low performing student was gifted, and the low performing students did better when they were told that compared to when they were told they were low performing.

Mismatched coursework, inference requires matched coursework; if the lecture and material covered do not match what's tested, they are testing your guessing or mindreading ability. This is common in courses that pay professors to teach who then refer their students to Khan Academy (yes this happens regularly), and online material such as an etextbook where the reading doesn't match what is being tested.

Lack of any redemption mechanisms so snowballs continue until dropout. This usually means no extra credit, no test retakes, no communication regarding the exact material that will be tested, no study guides that are verified for accuracy before the test, and no legitimate guidance provided by the professor during office hours. These all happen regularly in academia and impact outcomes towards the negative.

There is an escalation path if these issues are the case, but unfortunately unless you know how to accurately document and case-build, and have the money for a lawyer to sue them; by the time you get to reaching out to the Board of Trustees, you may still get no action.

After all, all bureaucracy seeks a lowest common denominator, which is often negative production value; and in any bureaucratic system standing is important and the people in these positions have their standing threatened since they themselves are also teachers or were at one point. Its easier for them to do nothing, since taking any action against their peers threatens their social standing among educators, they are all in it together first, and for the student second. These are longstanding issues that are common with any centralized structure that lead to corrupt systems.

There is a rule of thumb for checking disadvantaged structure based off probability, but it requires multivariable calculus and really doesn't tell you much except that you need to dig in more detail.

Probabilities are also notoriously impractical when it comes to actual likelihoods, its useful in finding out whether the distribution curve for passing has been scrunched to the point of pass|fail with extremely narrow outcomes.

Most of these problems are found in core transfer classes that are always full. The result is people can't transfer into specific programs since they often can't pass those gatekeeping courses with arbitrary pass requirements.

Some courses structured as described have a pass rate of less than 10%, and that includes all previous years of dropouts among the pool of potential passes; they don't track re-attempts.

The people that pass these courses are often people who break academic honesty policies. I won't tell you to do that, but sometimes in a corrupt/fraudulent system where they've lied or misled about the actual prospect of completion, I can't say its not a reasonable alternative given the lack of any kind of reform possible and the lack of any actual due process within the system. Being state funded means that often, absent any gross provable negligence, nothing legal will have standing; but you'd need to talk to a lawyer (with a proper case built, either for discrimination or fraud). If you plan to go the latter route, I'd suggest not tipping your hand.

Also, I've run into a few instances where test questions have marked my answer as incorrect when it was correct, and upon review it showed the answer they claimed I submitted was not the answer I submitted. I would suggest you use a screen recorder while you are doing any kind of assignment like this since you cannot trust anything will be above board.

Re: Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

#97
It really doesn’t matter. Just get the informatics degree and start looking for a job. At most places with education requirements, all they care about is that you have some kind of bachelors degree. I have worked with dozens of engineers with English, Philosophy, etc degrees. You’ll have to put in extra work getting your first job, but it’ll be just fine.

Re: Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

#98

I teach part time at the university level (I am not going to say where). I would love to give you my perspective on this as I see a lot of non-neurotypical students. Some of these students do well in an academic environment; some don't - and to generalize this across schools; some schools have a more regularized population and select for this. Similarly, others accommodate more for these types of things versus school…

> There are other door openers, like being a really good coder.

This may have been true at one point, but if it was ever true, it no longer is.

To get well-paying jobs (above the poverty line), you either need a degree or you need a certification. The certifications run into the exact same component issues of academia. Its optimizing for a specific type and limiting everyone else, and importantly its not primarily based upon knowing the material.

Certifications are the only alternative to a degree, and they get deprecated regularly and have no due process. Deprecations are as if you never had the certificate. If there is an issue, at best the single (only) company doing the testing will refund you for one certification, and then not allow you to try again (barring you from receiving a certificate). This is only in the case where you can prove they have done fraud/deceptive and unfair business practices, but can't get a court to nullify the NDA to provide standing for future litigation. If you can't, prove malfeasance they'll just keep your money; and their default practices try to limit any evidence they might provide. Accountability SOPs in a normal functioning business are often completely absent.

Employers will bring you in for interviews, and low ball you because they'll say "I see you don't have a degree, or applicable certificate. We can't pay you what we would pay a qualified person... How does ... sound?" (for skilled work normally paying 70-100k for the IT position). They count on you being desperate enough to take the pay cut after they have wasted as much time as possible.

Additionally business insurance can sometimes dictate that certain positions hold a comparable indicator of proficiency, where experience is not counted.

This same conversation occurs regularly even when you have a decade of direct experience doing the exact same job. I know because its happened to me during many interviews, and I've compared notes and every other person who has followed a similar path that I've met has had it happen regularly as well. I do well because I'm a miracle worker, but I always have to prove myself at every step, because I am significantly more than I am on paper.

For many people who have the education and skill to do the jobs, qualifications are just another means to limit future opportunity, keep wages low, and reduce income mobility.

In my opinion your advice is harmful because it misleads about reality, and the experience required to find out otherwise necessitates needless suffering.

Re: Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

#99

Offtop: Is ADHD overdiagnosed in US or underdiagnosed in Eastern EU?

The way that it is handled today, "ADHD" seems to represent a spectrum of symptoms rather than a well-understood root cause. I've seen people go through school and adulthood, with different doctors vacillating between "you definitely have ADHD" and, "there is no chance that you have ADHD". Clearly something is up, and their symptoms broadly fit the guidelines, but the typical medication (amphetamines) sometimes seems…

The prevalence of spectrum disorders being used as a catchall leads to over-diagnosis/mis-diagnosis. Many times there may be underlying causes that never or rarely get resolved or correctly diagnosed.

Chronic heavy metal poisoning for example was a common underlying cause that was often diagnosed as a spectrum disorder depending on symptoms presented.

It was very difficult to test because it doesn't stay in the blood but instead binds almost immediately. You had to work with a willing doctor and use a chelator and cause acute poisoning to determine if this was the case. Treatment options were not very good either.

For example, many people who received silver dental fillings have had this, while the ADA called it silver, and promoted it as stable, science in the last 20 years has shown marked neurotoxic effects which is why its mostly not used anymore (to my understanding).

The chemical composition of those fillings was 50% by weight mercury which leached when people drank acidic drinks (i.e. soda). Teens and young adults were at higher risk.

Re: Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

#100
I was a slightly above average student, but I was constantly told I was not living up to my full potential. This meant that despite me leaving sixth form with grades of which none were less than a B, I felt like a failure.

I dislike making excuses, but my time in the education system felt more akin to being pushed through a meat grinder. I remember one of the only times I went out of my way to actually attempt to do well in a class was when I was graciously told "I would amount to nothing" by a teacher, and used the rage incurred from that statement to to score in 99% percentile in all of he's exams following.

The reality of the situation for most of my time I was a socially inept barely functioning alcoholic. The people I surrounded myself with were all losers who didn't do much else other than smoke weed and fornicate with each other. I think I probably could of done better, but even so I still found myself in a carrer I genuinley find interesting with good prospects for growth. I don't credit the education to that at all.

To be brutally honest... all the education system really did was hold me back

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