Mastering Linear Algebra in 10 Days: Astounding Experiments in Ultra-Learning

I'm inclined to actually believing a lot of this.

When I got into university I found every course very easy, didn't attend any lectures, got all my workshops to run on the same day to reduce my face time and maxed out my free time to do whatever I wanted (work/friends/extra/etc). I'm a STEM major at a top 30 world ranked engineering school with good grades.

I've often asked if I could max out my classes and finish a degree within a year and a half - but I've never been allowed to skip more than a few subjects (tests/bugging the heads of departments).

University shouldn't be time capped or subject load restricted - people should be allowed to do as many as they wish - or you'll find more and more moving towards MOOCs instead.

The predictable response - education isn't about learning stuff, but proving you can work on things which aren't really important.

This is written from a student perspective, where "mastering" means passing the exam. I'll stick with Norvig's 10 000 hours.

I also am inclined to believe much of this. I actually did the same thing while at MIT for chemical engineering. Took all the required freshman through senior level classes at the same time, each semester, and finished all the requirements for a chemical engineering degree in a year. I loved MIT for this reason - they had no rules/regulations on the number of classes you could take in any semester, and they didn't enforce prerequisites/corequisites. Very different than other institutions I've trained at. I was still able to participate in extracurricular activities and develop relationships with lots of people.

It's true that I didn't attend a lot of classes (since they all overlapped anyways), and had 2-3exams virtually every week. The only issue I see is that there is only so much you can do online. I also did the same thing with Chemistry and Biology, which had lots of laboratory classes, and I don't see how one could gain the practical experience of putting knowledge to work in those fields without a wet lab class. EECS however is amenable to this (for the most part - likely hard for an optics laboratory), and most of my EECS labs were really done in Athena clusters instead of a distinct laboratory.

Learning for exams and learning for yourself are obviously different kinds of activities, even if the level of depth and rigour are similar.

For maths-heavy subjects, I'm not really inclined to believe that traditional exams are the best way to assess a student's knowledge and understanding of the material (especially with regard to rote memorisation). Exams in such subjects haven't changed fundamentally in many many decades, even though we now have lots and lots of new things we could do with them.

For instance: do more with computers - like getting the students to solve real-world, many-tentacled, hairy problems by numerical methods, rather than giving them some carefully pruned equation that just happens to have nice analytical solutions. Or introduce more computer-assisted mathematical modelling (e.g. use classical mechanics, to start with). Or on the pure front, teach students to write or at least understand some interesting automated theorem prover.

Stuff like that.

I suspect that traditional exams have survived simply because they serve their purpose: a percentage of exam-takers fail the exam (which allows the exam-setters to claim that their standards of assessment are rigorous), and a fair percentage will pass the exam, some with flying colours. Whether or not the actual learning goal was achieved has not been determined, since the exam is deemed to be the only instrument that can measure that.