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

This is fun to do during lectures but in my experience only about 5-10% of my learning happened in math class. The other 90% happened at home as I worked through the problem sets.

Essentially the lectures served as an inefficient way of delivering me a set of notes which I’d then reference during homework sessions. I could often predict what was coming next in the lecture but the really hard parts were the key parts in some technical lemmas that were necessary to complete the theorem. Learning how to figure out a key step like that had to come completely on my own (with no spoilers).

In a lot of ways, math lectures really started to turn into an experience similar to watching a Let’s Play of a favourite video game. Watching those can tell you exactly what you need to do to get past the part where you’re stuck but they don’t in general make you better at video games. For that you need to actually play them yourself.

Agree with this comment but follow up to this tip:

Only use this as a learning technique. Do not accidentally let this bleed over into personal 1:1 conversations.

I know some people in my life who are "smart" and they will cut people off in the middle of conversation to the effect of "oh yeah I already know what you are going to say, let me go ahead and cut you off so I can respond faster".

On top of being completely obnoxious on the face of it, they are wrong enough times in their predictions to where it completely fucks the conversation.

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.

There were times in university where I had figured out the material on my own (maybe even several lectures ahead), and the confirmation actually felt a bit disappointing.

This is good advice for the LSAT too, and baked into LSAT Demon's app. If you can predict an answer before looking at the choices, you're probably on the right 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.

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.

The problems were more obvious to me when I was older and trying to mentor college students.

Some of them just got it, absorbed good advice like a sponge, rejected bad advice, and did their best. They were unsurprisingly successful in life (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary)

The most frustrating cases were the students who got baited by angry internet advice. Reddit was a frequent source of bad advice. Some got pulled into 4Chan or Something Awful (depending on the era). Others were in weird IRC channels or Discords. All of them got poisoned by cynical online junk. I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway.

The hardest type for me to mentor were the students who had a bottomless bucket of excuses to pull from for everything in their life. Nothing was ever their fault, even if their failure was unambiguously traceable back to their lack of studying. It was always the fault of their professor, their roommate, their parents, their students, their friends, or even their mentors (me) because they had trained themselves to find someone or something to blame in every situation. Not surprisingly they were always failing to progress in life until they hit some situation that forced self-reflection and learning. Some of them managed to turn it around, but I can still find many of them angrily ranting into LinkedIn or other social media to this day.

Mentoring was hard. It was rewarding to work with the students who wanted to learn and knew how to prefer good advice over bad. For some it felt like most of the battle was just keeping them away from bad influences and resisting the urge to run to Reddit to find something that helped them believe nothing was their fault.

> 1. Follow actively the lessons.

It sounds obvious, but I wonder if this works for everyone. I've always had a very hard time to follow lessons (I studied maths then CS), but did work hard on the side and ultimately did quite well at tests and national exams.

I think the lecture format didn't work well for me, and I would have been better off with the just material, and access to a professor for questions.

For two years I wrote notes in class on yellow legal pad. After class, I rewrote into a spiral notebook, one for each class. That way I only carried a legal pad to each class everyday.

Not surprisingly, my grades those two years were great. Never had the fortitude to keep it up.

They told us which chapters to read before each lecture, nobody else that I knew did it. I did. It was super helpful.

I always overestimate how much I can do in one day and I underestimate how much I can get done in 100 days (with the caveat that I have to work on it consistently).

I don't think I'll ever understand/accept the idea of curving grades.

That won't work at elite schools like Stanford where a hard class average is like 98% and 94% will give you B+ due to the opposite curve being applied.

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

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.

I've always studied with peers after classes (I'm a chemistry master) and it was the best way to learn. Discuss different ideas and approaches and understandings was a force multiplier.

If the origin of that was a single study, you should learn about then replication crisis in psychology that called into question large swaths of results, after around 2/3rds of studies failed replication.

In university, how can you get a 4.0 with an 85% average? In high school they added 1.0 to honors courses but I don’t remember the same thing happening in undergrad.

Occasional all-nighters can be fun. We even did them at work back in the dotcom days. I wouldn't do them now, because they don't really accomplish anything. But they can be fun.

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

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?