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

cs.stanford.edu

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

#141

Post by jll29 »

whatever1 wrote: post #99
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…

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.

I strongly agree - I started teaching from slides and shifted more and more to blackboard and chalk.

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.

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

#142

Post by jama211 »

hufdr wrote: post #137

Although this advice is quite comprehensive, I think it assumes that you've already kept up with the pace of the course. In some schools, the curriculum moves so fast that students are thrown into problem sets before they’ve even grasped the basics. I’d love to see how he would advise someone who's already fallen behind and trying to catch up. For many people, that’s the more realistic situation.

This advice is aimed at students who are already getting good-great grades but want to optimise further. Advice for students that get poor grades is quite different.

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.

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

#143

Post by thefaux »

Chalk it up to youth perhaps, but this piece would benefit, in my view, from more "for me..." or "I found..." and less "You should/must/are..."

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.

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

#144

Post by jll29 »

nsagent wrote: post #114
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…

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.

That may require some experience, which you can obtain gradually by reading lots of papers, some good, some bad, to see how they do it. Eventually, you can tell if an experiment is suitable for showing strong support of the RQ or not.

(And you will also learn to read between the lines e.g. "Our resulst are PROMISING..." = there is much space for improvement etc.)

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

#145

Post by supersour »

airstrike wrote: post #117
buildbot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Even in that case it doesn't make sense. Why should the underperforming cohort be rewarded for doing poorly?

I think the prior probability in the bayesian sense is that the two entering cohorts are equally skilled (assuming students were randomly split into two sections as opposed to different sections being composed of different student bodies). If this were the case, the implication is that performance differences in standardized tests between cohorts are due to the professor (maybe one of the profs didn't cover the right material), so then normalization could be justified.

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

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

#146

Post by tibbar »

thefaux wrote: post #143

Chalk it up to youth perhaps, but this piece would benefit, in my view, from more "for me..." or "I found..." and less "You should/must/are..." 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 e…

> Having been tested for many years of my life (with pretty good results), here are some rules of thumb that I feel helped me

Oh, come now, I think Karpathy adequately qualifies his advice. :-)

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

#147

Post by jll29 »

joshvm wrote: post #17

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/g…

> One really important factor is the grading curve, if used.

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.)

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

#148

Post by jll29 »

marcodiego wrote: post #63

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 ever…

> ... should be offered by universities.

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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system

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

#149

Post by benmercer_dev »

alyxya wrote: post #19

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 n…

> I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this

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.

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

#150

Post by ropable »

Looking back at my time at university, I have to admit that I mainly attended group study sessions in order to spend more time with the attractive singles in our course. This had the accidental benefit of forcing me to study and discuss the material more (which led to better understanding) so that I could help coach others. That in turn led to 1) a reasonable side-hustle in tutoring and 2) dating and marrying my wife.
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