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

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

#171

Post by johnnyanmac »

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?

Depends on the rigor. The typical grade school curriculum is expecting you to keep up and get 80-90% of the content on a first go. Colleges can experiment with a variety of other kinds of methods. It's college, so there's no sense of "standaridized" content at this point.

For some, there's the idea of pushing a student to their limit and breaking their boundaries. A student getting 50% on a hard course may learn more and overall perform better in their career than if they were an A student in an easy course. Should they be punished because they didn't game the course and try to get the easy one?

And of course, someone getting 80% in such a course is probably truly the cream of the crop which would go unnoticed in an easy course.

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

#172

Post by johnnyanmac »

epolanski wrote: post #56
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…

This posts sums up everything that's wrong with grading and modern colleges.

Depends, is your goal in college to get a high GPA and look good for a job, or to truly learn and master content but not look as attractive on a resume without other projects?

Grading curves aim to mitigate punishment for the latter. It's part of why I could get a 2.5 GPA but still overall succeed in my career.

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

#173

Post by bananaflag »

jeffreygoesto wrote: post #162
arjie wrote: post #159

Fascinating. I wondered if this would suggest note-taking in lectures (it doesn't). This is something I never did and then finally I bent to everyone saying it's the most important thing and I did awfully in Algebraic Geometry. I had to return to my old technique of just paying 100% attention with 0% note taking, and then creating short cheat sheets of techniques in LaTeX before the exam. This is the first time I've…

I did not, it distracted me from listening. One of the key things to do was to do and not only read as many exercises as possible, including the old ones of the same professor. Then going back to reading the material once you got stuck. Most of the time I studied with a good friend who had to go to the army and did not want to lose those years. So I prepared everything during the semester and taught it to him when he…

I never got this idea that taking notes distracts you from listening. To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write (especially in math, where I usually rewrote some proofs on the fly so they were less ambiguous and more easy to check for correctness later).

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

#175

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

KronisLV wrote: post #169
ropable wrote: post #150

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…

> 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. The few times when someone tried to explain things to me live, lead to my brain just kinda blanking because of the time pressure and whatnot and it wasn't very useful for me. Instead, if I wanted to learn something properly, I'd have to just dig into the materia…

Same here. People trying to share information I have no interest in? Impossible to learn. My brain finding some interesting topic? Impossible to avoid ingesting all the knowledge about it.

Makes the first ~18 years of your life kind of difficult, as school basically is mostly the first part with not so much the second, but once you complete school or drop out to start working, being able to do the second part seems like a godsend compared to your peers.

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

#176

Post by lr4444lr »

Even if you're not allowed to bring it to the exam. Writing things down helps. What you want is to cram the entire course on 1 or more pages that you can in the end tile in front of you and say with high degree of confidence "This is exactly everything I must know"

Reminds me of this comedy bit in an American sitcom from about 35 years ago where the dumb kid when asked how his history test said it went okay but admitted he cheated. He explained that he tried to write down everything on his arm, there was not enough room despite multiple attempts at it. Then he realized he was starting to remember some of the content after the several rewrites, and said "so I just did it that way! I hid it all in my head and it was great! The professor didn't even know that I was cheating because there was no evidence!"

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

#177

Post by Leoluc »

" Study well in advance. Did I mention this already? Maybe I should stress it again. The brain really needs time to absorb material. Things that looked hard become easier with time. You want to alocate ~3 days for midterms, ~6 days for exams. "

Are you kidding? Don't expect to pass the calculus 3 exam I took as a Physics Engineer at Politecnico di Milano with less that one month (keep in mind: bare minimum) of studying ahead of the exam (lectures not included): If you could actually get good grades with what Andrej said, I totally chose the wrong university.

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

#179

Post by tim333 »

Leoluc wrote: post #177

" Study well in advance. Did I mention this already? Maybe I should stress it again. The brain really needs time to absorb material. Things that looked hard become easier with time. You want to alocate ~3 days for midterms, ~6 days for exams. " Are you kidding? Don't expect to pass the calculus 3 exam I took as a Physics Engineer at Politecnico di Milano with less that one month (keep in mind: bare minimum) of studyi…

In my physics group in Cambridge there was one student who was way better than the rest of us at physics although only normally bright at stuff outside of physics and the thing that was different about her was her dad was a physics prof and she was probably exposed to the advanced ideas a kid. I think in the same way kids pick up languages more easily than adults they may pick up other intellectual stuff.

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

#180

Post by rocqua »

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 worked great for me.

It meant that I understood the scaffolding of the course: the broad goals of the subject, the main ways to tackle them, what is currently being explored, and why are we going in this direction at this moment.

There was one class where this started to fail, which was a class without slides or a book. This meant that, without notes, when I recalled a proof technique but not the details, I had to resort to asking others for their notes. Because it wasn't documented anywhere else.

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