> If your grades aren't what you'd like them to be, then you probably need to change how you study!
it's always amusing but faintly horrifying to me to see people in schools speaking as if the purpose of learning is to earn grades, rather than vice versa; most of them are sufficiently educated to know about goodhart's law, but perhaps have not thought to apply it to this question
> Even though I was a diligent student, almost all the work I did in school was aimed at getting a good grade on something.
> To many people, it would seem strange that the preceding sentence has a "though" in it. Aren't I merely stating a tautology? Isn't that what a diligent student is, a straight-A student? That's how deeply the conflation of learning with grades has infused our culture.
> Is it so bad if learning is conflated with grades? Yes, it is bad. And it wasn't till decades after college, when I was running Y Combinator, that I realized how bad it is.
> I knew of course when I was a student that studying for a test is far from identical with actual learning. At the very least, you don't retain knowledge you cram into your head the night before an exam. But the problem is worse than that. The real problem is that most tests don't come close to measuring what they're supposed to.
...
> Why did founders tie themselves in knots doing the wrong things when the answer was right in front of them? Because that was what they'd been trained to do. Their education had taught them that the way to win was to hack the test. And without even telling them they were being trained to do this. The younger ones, the recent graduates, had never faced a non-artificial test. They thought this was just how the world worked: that the first thing you did, when facing any kind of challenge, was to figure out what the trick was for hacking the test.
i'm not sure all the advice here is even good for hacking the test, though. taking notes in lecture, for example; when i've tried that, i've missed most of what the lecturer was saying because i was distracted by the notes. i figured that the people who were writing instead of asking questions must just be a lot smarter than i was, to be able to understand the lecture even though they were busy writing, until i saw that i got better grades on the tests than they did (a bad measure, but it was their target measure)
if you want to have a complete, undigested copy of the lecture, probably you should film it on your phone instead of playing court reporter. on the other hand, if you are playing court reporter, you should definitely study shorthand first, gregg or pitman rather than speedwriting. on the gripping hand, if you want a complete, undigested explanation of some body of knowledge, you should check out this amazing invention this jeweler guy made out of a wine press, i think his name is gutenbag or something, it can copy down an entire page of lecture notes in a couple of seconds, hundreds of times faster than a scribe
in-person lectures are a precious opportunity to ask an expert in the field questions about things you don't understand; don't waste them on stenographically reproducing a textbook you can just download. the syllabus usually tells you what the lecture was about (and, if not, you can devote two minutes to writing down one line at the end), and if you really internalize the points being made, you won't have any trouble applying them
i'm a huge fan of taking notes; i take about a page of notes per day as part of my own study strategies. i just don't do it during lectures
another difficulty with the strategies outlined here is that they depend on being able to evaluate this boolean
IF you do not understand it, THEN
but determining whether you understand something is one of the most difficult things about learning! you can't rely on your feelings when you read it; those mostly stem from familiarity. asking 'why?' as suggested is a little better, but it's common for people to accept weak reasons for statements they're already predisposed to believe (for example, because they're familiar). instead, you must try to apply it. one approach is working out possible causes ('why?') and consequences, as well as possible causes and consequences of the negation; but often you can be more focused, because in many cases you are learning a particular thing in order to gain a particular ability. you learn about 'if' statements, for example, in order to be able to write a computer program that uses them (if not to pass a test); so, attempting to write such programs is often better than asking yourself 'why does the if statement in c have parentheses around the condition?', which is not something you can answer—at least, easily, as a novice programmer, or, possibly, at all, given that thompson chose to omit them in golang. (considering that question as you're writing a compiler can illuminate syntax design tradeoffs!)
ideally, you would do this before the lecture, so that when the lecturer is explaining the concepts you were attempting to apply, you know what questions to ask. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39330756 points out that ideally you would read the relevant textbook material before the lecture. while i agree that this ought to be ideal, i'm reluctant to give advice i haven't actually tried myself
adding marginalia, on the other hand, is an excellent idea, just as suggested here, so the advice here isn't all bad
with respect to cramming, a big problem with the schooling system is that it incentivizes cramming on many levels. (just after saying 'don't cram', this text advises you on exactly how to cram.) taking one semester of, for example, greek, involves spending perhaps 50 hours in class and 70 hours studying outside class; if you spend 120 hours studying greek spread over many years, you will have a lifelong working greek vocabulary of thousands of words. by contrast, if you spend 120 hours studying greek crammed into a single semester, then never use it again, you will forget even most of the alphabet within five years. memorably, i had forgotten even 'ουχ', the greek word for 'not'
consequently, almost all the time spent studying in school is wasted, in the sense that it doesn't give the students any new intellectual powers; the temporary gains in capabilities are quickly lost, as the students recede to their previous level, like flowers for algernon. this observation is so commonplace that it fails to provoke the appropriate level of existential horror
if your objective is learning rather than earning grades, advice like 'do not be tempted, by any free time that you have during exam week, to do anything other than studying' is highly counterproductive. to the extent that you study at all during exam week, your exam grades will be unrealistically inflated and will overstate your real level of knowledge, destroying the utility of the exam as an assessment of your lasting understanding. failing some exams will enable you to repeat the classes again next semester so you can study the material you didn't understand in more depth
obviously this is terrible advice if you want to graduate, or even stay in grad school, but just as obviously, it's what you'd do if you were using the exams for learning rather than to obtain credentials to flourish in front of the ignorant
a piece of advice that really ought to be in here, but isn't, is to teach the material you've learned to someone else. another very useful strategy is to get someone else to teach it to you in a one-on-one tutoring session, which will increase your performance by about two standard deviations (the well-known 'bloom's 2-sigma problem'). wealthy and powerful people can get experts to tutor them thus, and have been doing so for millennia. large parts of grad school also usually consist of teaching material you supposedly already know and one-on-one apprenticeship. the rest of us have to make do with asking questions in open lecture, meeting with other students to do exercises together, going to the kinds of parties where people talk about the stuff they studied last semester, and maybe help from family members who already know it. if you have those opportunities, don't waste them
it's always amusing but faintly horrifying to me to see people in schools speaking as if the purpose of learning is to earn grades, rather than vice versa; most of them are sufficiently educated to know about goodhart's law, but perhaps have not thought to apply it to this question
a useful counterpoint may be pg's https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
> Even though I was a diligent student, almost all the work I did in school was aimed at getting a good grade on something.
> To many people, it would seem strange that the preceding sentence has a "though" in it. Aren't I merely stating a tautology? Isn't that what a diligent student is, a straight-A student? That's how deeply the conflation of learning with grades has infused our culture.
> Is it so bad if learning is conflated with grades? Yes, it is bad. And it wasn't till decades after college, when I was running Y Combinator, that I realized how bad it is.
> I knew of course when I was a student that studying for a test is far from identical with actual learning. At the very least, you don't retain knowledge you cram into your head the night before an exam. But the problem is worse than that. The real problem is that most tests don't come close to measuring what they're supposed to.
...
> Why did founders tie themselves in knots doing the wrong things when the answer was right in front of them? Because that was what they'd been trained to do. Their education had taught them that the way to win was to hack the test. And without even telling them they were being trained to do this. The younger ones, the recent graduates, had never faced a non-artificial test. They thought this was just how the world worked: that the first thing you did, when facing any kind of challenge, was to figure out what the trick was for hacking the test.
i'm not sure all the advice here is even good for hacking the test, though. taking notes in lecture, for example; when i've tried that, i've missed most of what the lecturer was saying because i was distracted by the notes. i figured that the people who were writing instead of asking questions must just be a lot smarter than i was, to be able to understand the lecture even though they were busy writing, until i saw that i got better grades on the tests than they did (a bad measure, but it was their target measure)
if you want to have a complete, undigested copy of the lecture, probably you should film it on your phone instead of playing court reporter. on the other hand, if you are playing court reporter, you should definitely study shorthand first, gregg or pitman rather than speedwriting. on the gripping hand, if you want a complete, undigested explanation of some body of knowledge, you should check out this amazing invention this jeweler guy made out of a wine press, i think his name is gutenbag or something, it can copy down an entire page of lecture notes in a couple of seconds, hundreds of times faster than a scribe
in-person lectures are a precious opportunity to ask an expert in the field questions about things you don't understand; don't waste them on stenographically reproducing a textbook you can just download. the syllabus usually tells you what the lecture was about (and, if not, you can devote two minutes to writing down one line at the end), and if you really internalize the points being made, you won't have any trouble applying them
i'm a huge fan of taking notes; i take about a page of notes per day as part of my own study strategies. i just don't do it during lectures
another difficulty with the strategies outlined here is that they depend on being able to evaluate this boolean
but determining whether you understand something is one of the most difficult things about learning! you can't rely on your feelings when you read it; those mostly stem from familiarity. asking 'why?' as suggested is a little better, but it's common for people to accept weak reasons for statements they're already predisposed to believe (for example, because they're familiar). instead, you must try to apply it. one approach is working out possible causes ('why?') and consequences, as well as possible causes and consequences of the negation; but often you can be more focused, because in many cases you are learning a particular thing in order to gain a particular ability. you learn about 'if' statements, for example, in order to be able to write a computer program that uses them (if not to pass a test); so, attempting to write such programs is often better than asking yourself 'why does the if statement in c have parentheses around the condition?', which is not something you can answer—at least, easily, as a novice programmer, or, possibly, at all, given that thompson chose to omit them in golang. (considering that question as you're writing a compiler can illuminate syntax design tradeoffs!)ideally, you would do this before the lecture, so that when the lecturer is explaining the concepts you were attempting to apply, you know what questions to ask. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39330756 points out that ideally you would read the relevant textbook material before the lecture. while i agree that this ought to be ideal, i'm reluctant to give advice i haven't actually tried myself
adding marginalia, on the other hand, is an excellent idea, just as suggested here, so the advice here isn't all bad
with respect to cramming, a big problem with the schooling system is that it incentivizes cramming on many levels. (just after saying 'don't cram', this text advises you on exactly how to cram.) taking one semester of, for example, greek, involves spending perhaps 50 hours in class and 70 hours studying outside class; if you spend 120 hours studying greek spread over many years, you will have a lifelong working greek vocabulary of thousands of words. by contrast, if you spend 120 hours studying greek crammed into a single semester, then never use it again, you will forget even most of the alphabet within five years. memorably, i had forgotten even 'ουχ', the greek word for 'not'
consequently, almost all the time spent studying in school is wasted, in the sense that it doesn't give the students any new intellectual powers; the temporary gains in capabilities are quickly lost, as the students recede to their previous level, like flowers for algernon. this observation is so commonplace that it fails to provoke the appropriate level of existential horror
if your objective is learning rather than earning grades, advice like 'do not be tempted, by any free time that you have during exam week, to do anything other than studying' is highly counterproductive. to the extent that you study at all during exam week, your exam grades will be unrealistically inflated and will overstate your real level of knowledge, destroying the utility of the exam as an assessment of your lasting understanding. failing some exams will enable you to repeat the classes again next semester so you can study the material you didn't understand in more depth
obviously this is terrible advice if you want to graduate, or even stay in grad school, but just as obviously, it's what you'd do if you were using the exams for learning rather than to obtain credentials to flourish in front of the ignorant
a piece of advice that really ought to be in here, but isn't, is to teach the material you've learned to someone else. another very useful strategy is to get someone else to teach it to you in a one-on-one tutoring session, which will increase your performance by about two standard deviations (the well-known 'bloom's 2-sigma problem'). wealthy and powerful people can get experts to tutor them thus, and have been doing so for millennia. large parts of grad school also usually consist of teaching material you supposedly already know and one-on-one apprenticeship. the rest of us have to make do with asking questions in open lecture, meeting with other students to do exercises together, going to the kinds of parties where people talk about the stuff they studied last semester, and maybe help from family members who already know it. if you have those opportunities, don't waste them