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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)

#41

Post by billy99k »

wafflemaker wrote: post #25
random9749832 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've met lot of smart guys never getting anywhere, because they were always looking for a shortcut and not to do the real work. Linux instructor Jason Canon wrote once that there's a lot of people who spend 90% of the time reading articles on how to learn Linux, but only 10% really practicing. OTOH it's a really cool way to stay focused and engaged with the lecture.

I've seen this a lot over the years and I've been guilty of it myself. I do still look at articles and find good stuff from it, but I've replaced it with paid courses that offer hands-on examples.

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

#42

Post by orev »

kevmo314 wrote: post #34

> All-nighters are not worth it. I disagree. I made some of my best friends through all nighters and continue to occasionally pull them because they reinvigorate meaning into my work as they did my coursework. If your only metric for success in school is your GPA, then yes all nighters aren’t worth it. But climbing a metric leaderboard isn’t the only measure of doing well in a course. It is curious because Andrej rec…

Why do friends need to be made through all-nighters? Could you have made the same friends by organizing study groups during regular hours, and then doing something else fun with those people in the evenings?

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

#45

Post by billy99k »

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…

My technique was to write tons of notes during the lecture. In college, I would have many pages of notes for each lecture and because writing is more of an active process than just sitting or spacing out for an hour, I rarely had to study for an exam.

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

#46

Post by leobg »

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…

Well said. And it makes sense, if you define intelligence as the ability to successfully predict the future.

And how interesting that that is literally how LLMs are trained during pretraining. Like Ilya said: To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of a detective novel, you must have followed the plot, have world knowledge about physics, psychology, etc..

And that’s what you’re pointing at here. Testing yourself on the ability to predict during a lecture is like running a loss function to keep you on your toes.

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

#47

Post by xmprt »

britzkopf wrote: post #28
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…

So another strategy to do well might include tempting your classmates to distraction or perhaps offering to "help" them but in fact feed them misinformation? Got it.

You are typically the average of the people you keep around you. If you feel like you're going to get ahead by tricking your friends/peers then it likely means that you're not going to gain much when compared to the rest of the class (unless you're somehow able to deceive an entire class of 100+ students). On the flip side, if you and all your friends are supportive of each other then you're more likely to succeed when compared to the rest of the class. This does have the opposite effect of making it harder for students that don't have the same support/study groups but it goes completely against the point you're trying to make.

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

#48

Post by SoftTalker »

quacked wrote: post #33
ido wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the reason is that most late-teens/early-twenty-somethings are not responsible/emotionally mature enough to put in the required amount of work in the relatively free environment of university where nobody is checking if you’re doing your homework or show up to class.

Every undergraduate student I met over the age of 22 was much, much better than their young counterparts within the same ability cohort.

I've read that the highest levels of brain development are not complete until about age 25.

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

#49

Post by jokellum »

> Places with a lot of background noise are bad and have a research-supported negative impact on learning. Libraries and Reading rooms work best.

This was horrible advice for me and caused my a lot of grief for many years wondering why I still couldn't focus.

Nothing against Andrej, part of the reason I hate this advice is that this is very common advice for what your environment should look like. This was advice given by study workshops at my college. I'm sure this works for a decent chunk of the student population.

Quiet places cause me to mentally drift into outer space and I just zone out.

You know what is a great environment? Semi-busy coffee shops + headphones + instrumental music. I'm able to consistently lock in for 4-5 hours. When I go back to my "nice quiet home environment" I get distracted immediately and refocusing is super hard.

Like I said, this is standard advice that works for a portion of the population, but I think this makes a ton of other people in the same boat as me feel lazy/discouraged/unfocused/stupid losers when in reality "nice quiet places" might not work for them.

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

#50

Post by kevmo314 »

orev wrote: post #42
kevmo314 wrote: post #34

> All-nighters are not worth it. I disagree. I made some of my best friends through all nighters and continue to occasionally pull them because they reinvigorate meaning into my work as they did my coursework. If your only metric for success in school is your GPA, then yes all nighters aren’t worth it. But climbing a metric leaderboard isn’t the only measure of doing well in a course. It is curious because Andrej rec…

Why do friends need to be made through all-nighters? Could you have made the same friends by organizing study groups during regular hours, and then doing something else fun with those people in the evenings?

They don't have to be, nor am I claiming that all nighters are unilaterally positive. But they were an integral part of my college experience and many of my friends' and I enjoyed them in a type 2 fun kind of way.

Asserting that they're not worth it misses the broader picture.

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