31–40 of 117 posts
The book is easier to read in a browser at the Internet Archive: Google scan: https://archive.org/details/asynopsiselemen00carrgoog MSN scan: https://archive.org/details/synopsisofelemen00carrrich
Thank you!
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> : I was top 10 in JEE This should be anti-source if you say you don't need to prepare hard enough.
I did have to prepare hard in those two years, but two years was more than enough. A lot about doing well in an exam as selective as this comes down to winning the genetic lottery. If you do not have the aptitude, then spending 5-6 years wholly devoted to an exam you are not going to crack is going to be an extremely demotivating way to spend your entire teenage life.
It's interesting to note that Ramanujan also completed SL Loney's books on Coordinate Geometry and Trigonometry before he turned 12. These books are today used by almost every aspirant in the IIT-JEE, the engineering entrance exam in India. I'm trying to complete them, they're genuinely wonderful books. I believe they are also available on archive.org, although I use print editions.
A bit off-topic, but I just googled some IIT-JEE questions and found the following: A large number of bullets are fired in all directions with same speed u. What is the maximum area on the ground on which these bullets will spread. The provided answers all depend only on u, pi, and g. How can this be possible? Obviously, if I fire the gun from a tower, this area will be larger than when I fire it from the ground, and…
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>In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. That's more due to Indian coaching companies preying on Indian's parents' extreme sense of desperation and FOMO for their children rather than any real need to start that early. I don't think any more than two years are required or recommended for preparation of the exam. The longer you stretch the preparation, the longer…
That’s not a great source. Sounds like extreme sampling bias to me. What I’m saying is, you don’t know what it’s like being mediocre at school. I do. In my experience, being at the top is extremely motivating. It encourages you to put in even more effort. The opposite is also true - when you feel like you’ve given it everything but you’re still in middle of the pack, you get burned out. It’s easy for someone who prob…
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That’s not a great source. Sounds like extreme sampling bias to me. What I’m saying is, you don’t know what it’s like being mediocre at school. I do. In my experience, being at the top is extremely motivating. It encourages you to put in even more effort. The opposite is also true - when you feel like you’ve given it everything but you’re still in middle of the pack, you get burned out. It’s easy for someone who prob…
So, here's my thinking. The goal of the exams is not to find the children who are middle of the pack. The goal of the exams is to find the outliers. The unusually bright. What I think actually happens is you capture the top 0.1% because they're too smart not to make it, but the other 0.9% of passes is a mixture of highly trained, hard working kids alongside the intended targets. I guess I always wonder what could be…
It's interesting to note that Ramanujan also completed SL Loney's books on Coordinate Geometry and Trigonometry before he turned 12. These books are today used by almost every aspirant in the IIT-JEE, the engineering entrance exam in India. I'm trying to complete them, they're genuinely wonderful books. I believe they are also available on archive.org, although I use print editions.
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I did have to prepare hard in those two years, but two years was more than enough. A lot about doing well in an exam as selective as this comes down to winning the genetic lottery. If you do not have the aptitude, then spending 5-6 years wholly devoted to an exam you are not going to crack is going to be an extremely demotivating way to spend your entire teenage life.
Well, this is not a binary classification: there are those fortunate few who have, as you say, won the "genetic intelligence lottery" and sail through school and exams such as this with little to no effort, then there are those who have to study hard for x years in order to make it, then there are those who need extra tutoring, and then there are of course some who even with all the help their parents can afford will…
You are missing that the context here is getting through an extremely selective competitive examination. Only the top 5% students by aptitude for math/science/engineering have any significant chance of getting through. The rest are just fodder for the coaching industry selling increasingly more and more extreme and ridiculous products. Soon they might start selling products for coaching the unborn baby by teaching maths to the mother too.
None of what I am saying is intended to apply to the practice of actually being a professional engineer or having a successful career.
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So, here's my thinking. The goal of the exams is not to find the children who are middle of the pack. The goal of the exams is to find the outliers. The unusually bright. What I think actually happens is you capture the top 0.1% because they're too smart not to make it, but the other 0.9% of passes is a mixture of highly trained, hard working kids alongside the intended targets. I guess I always wonder what could be…
Yes, what people competing to get their children into the 0.9% miss is that 1. There are going to be other tests and hurdles in the future which differentiate your child from those with very high natural aptitude. 2. If your child worked 10 times as the top achievers to attain a similar level, at the next stage they will have to work 20 times as hard, then 100 times as hard, until it simply becomes impossible. 3. Whi…
Intelligence is speed. Knowledge is distance. If you are very smart and other kids are not as smart, if you give them more time then they can reach the same benchmark as you.
When metrics become targeted, it is a sign that your community has scaled beyond what it can handle, and you have lost personal accountability. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
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So, here's my thinking. The goal of the exams is not to find the children who are middle of the pack. The goal of the exams is to find the outliers. The unusually bright. What I think actually happens is you capture the top 0.1% because they're too smart not to make it, but the other 0.9% of passes is a mixture of highly trained, hard working kids alongside the intended targets. I guess I always wonder what could be…
I've caught the exceptional by being a commited teacher. You notice that they are ahead of the pack, by different signs: some make great questions in class, others barely say a word but utterly ace the exams, others are incredibile driven and tell you about their interests, others aren't, but when challenged they respond with interesting solutions. Of course, that may not be a scalable way to find them. But if you ha…
That's the crux, though - the common theme behind failures of modern education, among other things. It seems to me that becoming a developed country comes with the desperate need to make everything scalable, and losing the ability to do things that do not scale.