Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

cs.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 207 posts

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#11

Post by levocardia »

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.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#12

Post by Almondsetat »

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

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#14

Post by sfn42 »

Almondsetat wrote: post #12

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

They told us which chapters to read before each lecture, nobody else that I knew did it. I did. It was super helpful.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#15

Post by random9749832 »

brosco wrote: post #10

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…

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.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#17

Post by joshvm »

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%.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#18

Post by Projectiboga »

constantcrying wrote: post #6

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) t…

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.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#19

Post by alyxya »

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.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#20

Post by aidenn0 »

constantcrying wrote: post #6

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) t…

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"
Post reply on HN