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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)

#181

Post by fifticon »

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 is disturbingly similar to the comment just above it :-). Congratulations.. If you by accident demonstrate desirable attributes or qualities while being observed by another sex, you run the risk of attracting them :-)

(apologies in advance to those who wish to attract the same sex; I assume it works there too).

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

#182

Post by rocqua »

baq wrote: post #161
whatever1 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reading from slides is the absolute worst way of delivery anywhere, whether it’s a lecture or an internal presentation to your work team, doesn’t matter. The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles. Chalk and board though is not necessarily the best. Power point supports magic hotkeys - B and W - and allows drawing on slides. Wh…

I slightly disagree. Specifically, in the case of academic lectures, on:

> The best power point slides have zero overlapping words with what the presenter is saying except perhaps some slide or section titles.

Especially when not taking notes, having the slides effectively be lecture notes is great to allow you to go back to the content of the lecture days or weeks later.

That does not mean that I want a lecturer to just read from the slides. But I want the slides to be more than just a visual aid for the lecture. They need to be reference material as well. This is also generally accepted, and can be considered the reason so many other presentations where this is a bad idea, still have the bad lecture-style slides. Because its what is modeled to people during their education.

Note, for presentations to stakeholders, or presentations of results, or almost any other type of professional presentation. Slides should probably be visual aids only, and not reference material. But lectures are a special case.

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

#183

Post by shortrounddev2 »

bananaflag wrote: post #173
jeffreygoesto wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Depends on your note-taking strategy. I would just transcribe what the professor was saying and ended up not paying attention. I turned my brain into a transcription machine and didn't take any time to grok anything I heard, then I had to re-read the textbook later. Nobody ever "taught" me how to study, so I was bad at it. Failed my way through high school and dropped out of college

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

#184

Post by n4r9 »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #75
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an article about doing well in courses, not in making friends

Making friends is one of the most important reasons to go to college. Friends from that era of my life later hired me into excellent jobs that changed my generational wealth. About half of my friends met their life partners during college. Several of my lifelong best friends are people I met through college friends and activities. The more career-minded might call it "networking".

Nevertheless, the article is specifically about doing well in courses.

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

#185

Post by bluGill »

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 find notes useful only in that they need to try to to figure out what to write next keeps me from daydreaming. I have dysgraphia so there is no hope I can read any notes latter, nor is there hope that I could possibly transcribe what is said word for words so I'm looking for the main points - which is what is most commonly recommended you write down.

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

#186

Post by bluGill »

tim333 wrote: post #179
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.

It matters what topics are taught in elementary school, and how they are taught. We as society need to figure out what is going to be important in 40 years (when current kids are 45-50 years old) and ensure those things are started so they slowly have time to get the concepts.

I can be reasonably confident that logical thinking will be important, which you can get from Math (philosophy also has logic - is that useful too? My background is math so I don't know about that side). I'm sure other parts of math will be useful but not what. The BASIC I learned in school was worthless (it would have been useful as an introduction if my teachers didn't teach/test so many "facts" that were wrong - I was too shy to tell them that back then and now I'm mature enough to know I'd get in trouble without changing anything so there was no point)

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

#187

Post by skeeter2020 »

121789 wrote: post #154
jama211 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

Plenty of places ask for GPA for university graduates, and a low ine is disqualifying. After a few years no one will ever care again, again unless you want to go to a grad school like an MBA, where a very low GPA can again be disqualifying

maybe if you want to attend a top MBA program at some schools, but since it's intended for a diverse range of undergrad degrees and there are a million MBA programs you can find one that will let you in. They also focus on your final coursework where most people have by then learned how to get at least decent grades and your GMAT score so a couple of early bad years won't disqualify you.

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

#188

Post by lan321 »

airstrike wrote: post #158
joshvm wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is to identify if there is a particularly easy/hard exam and the average score of the cohort is significantly different to how they perform in other classes. "Doing poorly" is quite hard to define when none of the tests, perhaps outside of the core 1st and 2nd year modules, are standard.

Tests can be consistent over time without being a true standard. Student competency can vary much more greatly than test content.

Not really since then all students can learn the exam as a template after 2-3 exams leak.

The curving I know at uni was targeting to exmatriculate 45% by the 3rd semester and another 40% of that by the end so the grades were adjusted to where X% would fail each exam. Then your target wasn't understanding the material but being better than half of the students taking it. The problems were complicated and time was severely limited so it wasn't like you could really have a perfect score. Literally 1-2 people would get a perfect score in an exam taken by 1000 people with many exams not having a perfect score.

I was one of the exmatriculated and moving to more standard tests made things much easier since you can learn templates with no real understanding. For example an exam with 5 tasks would have a pool of 10 possible tasks, each with 3-4 variations and after a while the possibilities for variation would become clear so you could make a good guess on what this semesters slight difference will likely be.

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

#189

Post by spunker540 »

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 am the same way— I find note taking distracts me such that I end up missing important things, and my notes are usually worthless too. I did pretty well at school with my no-notes approach. Obviously it’s useful to write down assignments, or the occasional verbatim example from the whiteboard. But for me, notes usually hinder more than they help.

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

#190

Post by pavel_lishin »

lr4444lr wrote: post #176

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 admit…

This sounds like something Reese from "Malcolm in the Middle" would do and say.
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