This is either outright bullshit, or your college was complete crap. Most likely the former.
Don't do this. You think you're gaining respect or credibility, but in actuality you're losing it.
None of this is to say that university is the one (or even best, or even a good) way for a specific individual to start his/her career. But college-bound kids could do much worse than RIT.
I went there for a few years, so take what I say with the appropriate amount of salt.
I wasn't quite as quick as the poster -- the total amount of effort I put into a course probably amounted to 2-3 days of work, including time spent in classes and exams. But, I knew people who were easily an order of magnitude more productive than I was; for them, it would have been an afternoon of work. If you read quickly, you can finish reading a textbook in an afternoon. The extra time I burned was the time it took to work through enough exercises to convince myself that I really got the material. For some really easy classes, I only had to do one exercise per section to convince myself that I knew it, so it ended up being just one afternoon. There are plenty of people who are smarter than I am, who could do every class that way. I don't know if the writer of the original article is one of those people, but it doesn't sound implausible to me.
Just for reference, I went to Wisconsin, which is approximately as rigorous as RIT, and I double majored in math and computer engineering, which are both comparable to CS. But, I graduated in three years and my tuition was a few thousand a year, so the total was was easily covered by an engineering internship. At a place like Wisconsin, you might as well stick around and get the degree -- after all, it's only a month or two of total effort, and you can easily make enough to cover the degree from doing internships, or working as an RA on campus or even at Starbucks. If the price tag were $44k a year, I probably would have dropped out, too.
I admit it's possible I'm fooling myself, but it's the way a lot of people are saying -- that I just skated by on easy courses and missed out on the material in the hard courses. I actually got my As mostly in the advanced undergrad and grad classes. Most of my Bs came in my last year, when I had to go back and take all the intro classes I skipped in order to meet graduation requirements. The math department was fine with, e.g., letting me skipping undergrad abstract algebra because I'd taken graduate matrix analysis (which requires grad algebra), but the engineering department wouldn't let me skip intro e-mag even though I'd taken high powered diode lasers (which, IIRC, required grad e-mag II).
A lot of the Bs came in "easy" classes where the average grade on exams was 85-90. I never did enough problems to stop making mistakes, so I got an 85-90 on pretty much all my exams, which is only good for a B if that's average. The classes that I did really well in were the ones where professors asked questions on exams that required real original thought; the average grade on one of those exams might be something like 30 or 50, but I'd still get an 85-90 most of the time. The one way I selected courses that were "easy" was that I chose professors who made homework a small part of the grade, so I wouldn't fail just for not doing any homework.
Someone else mentioned Ramanujan. Well, I'm not a genius, and I know that. One of my high school friends got a silver in the international math Olympiad, and he didn't even think he was good at math because his little brother was a lot better (and his little brother later got a gold). I'm not even close to that, and even those guys aren't in the same league as Ramanujan, but I read pretty quickly and I have a decent memory for abstract concepts. I think whether or not people are sure the original poster is full of crap depends on who they hung out with in high school and college. Frankly, I was the dumbest of my close friends in high school, and about average among my college friends. When I look at my high school and college friends, any of them could have done this (with the exception of the guy who never made mistakes because he was slow and methodical, even on easy stuff), so it's not obvious to me that the original poster is just spouting off, even if it seems obvious to everyone else.
The math olympiad friend I mentioned above would go through the text for his classes and do every problem in the book before the class started. That took him a few of weeks. Someone mentioned that an engineering problem set takes more than an afternoon. That's probably true for a lot of people, but problem sets in engineering and math don't take much time if you know how to do them. The limiting factor is how quickly you come up with a solution, which can be pretty much instantaneous. There are some exceptions -- I remember some VLSI questions that basically amounted to doing a SPICE simulation by hand. And most labs are, unfortunately, gated by the amount of tedious work you have to do.
On the comment that my experience doesn't count because I'm an outlier, well what's P(guy makes original blog post | not an outlier) vs. P(guy makes original blog post | is an outlier)? I don't have any idea, but neither does anyone else here, and yet every other poster seems to be completely certain that the guy who wrote the original post is full of it. I'm not even saying that it's likely that the guy is credible; I'm just saying it's possible.
I can also believe that someone who's capable of doing that would fail out, because I almost did the same thing in high school. IIRC, my GPA was about 1.6 when I applied to colleges. I only managed to get into a decent school because I was lucky enough to be from a state that had a decent state school that had a policy of letting anyone in with an ACT score above some threshold (32 or 34, I forget which). And even then, I almost didn't got my admission rescinded by failing to graduate. A lot of teachers in my HS had a policy of giving people As in their class if they got a 5 on the AP exam. I got a 4 on the AP chemistry exam, and a big fat F in the class. I'd failed enough classes that I didn't have enough credits to graduate without AP Chem. The chemistry teacher didn't know that, but he was still nice enough to change my grade to a C when he saw that I got a 4. Thanks Mr. Swanson. I don't know what would have ended up happening if I failed out of high school. I spent most of my time in college in libraries, just reading. In theory, I could have done that even without being a student, but I doubt I would have.
I don't believe you spent 2 days worth work on a non-trivial course and produce A or near A level work.
People are promoting this anti-college line with utter propaganda and lies. It's one thing to debate whether college is for everyone ... But come on guys, don't lie.
Now, yes I admit it is possible that you are like Ramanujan so I'm not going to commit 100% to this, but I'm going to commit 99.999%
Even if it were true, your ability would be astronomically beyond the vast majority of even highly educated people. Therefore, this would be the most statistically insignificant data point ever, which makes me further question this ability -- how could such an error be committed????
Why is this anti-college view of so many built on such a weird foundation?
Of course, that is not to say that there are not courses that require greater diligence - but they're often avoidable, and a student can compensate by putting effort into those specific classes. Or simply cheating.
A single math/engineering problem set at any reasonable university will take more than an afternoon, so I really don't see how it's possible you knew people who were learning everything in an afternoon and getting A's/B's. Maybe it's possible in the lowest level courses where you went in already knowing most of the material, but otherwise I'm calling shenanigans.
This whole attitude that you are above college is just ridiculous. You get out of college what you put in. If it's really so easy, and you are so self-motivated, then you would put in your 15 mins a week to get your degree with the understanding of the benefit of the diploma, and then pursue your own self studies / startup / career on the side. Or if the cost-benefit isn't there you just don't go. You don't go, and then fail out, and then make excuses about how you were too good for it. That's not to say you can't game the system what with grade inflation and easy classes, but that's not a true indication of the potential value of college.
I found the early CS classes extremely easy as well, you know why? Because I've been programming since I was 10, so of course the class is going to have to move a little slow to allow beginners to grok pointers and recursion. It doesn't matter how smart you are, you have to turn it over in your head for a while, which some of us happened to do before college. On the other hand, by year 3 when I was taking 5000-level Networking, Graphics, and Compilers it was definitely not so easy, and I guarantee neither you nor any of your brilliant friends would be plowing through that material 10 times faster than the course was designed.
He says it was RIT or Rochester Institute of Technology. I went there (although it was a much better value for me, since I was in NTID, the deaf sub-college, so I basically got half off tuition); and now that I check, we actually overlapped.
It's a pretty good school for tech, but the quarter system is/was brutal for people who weren't very conscientious because you get very little chance for recovery once you screw up. The Rochester winter probably didn't help. Retention rates weren't too good, and people like him demonstrate why.
Structured learning tends to be methodical, thorough, and slow. You proceed chapter by chapter, book by book, building knowledge on top of knowledge. It's good for establishing a foundation, or for pushing you through dull but potentially useful topics, but because you must stick to the track, it doesn't give you much leeway to follow up on bursts of inspiration.
Self-directed learning, in contrast, tends to be patchy and undisciplined, but it crucially allows one to harness and follow those winds of inspiration when they blow, and that offers incredible benefits for motivation and retention.
Structured learning provides a syllabus and a schedule to ensure that you fill in the gaps. Learning when touched by the muse makes you yearn to fill in the gaps, yearn to reach the next level of understanding.
"I could teach myself more in an afternoon than I would learn in a 10-week class."
This psychological shift is what self-learners are referring to when they make such claims. They aren't saying that they can literally get through 10 weeks of coursework in an afternoon, they're saying that being allowed to take their own path through a subject and approach it in a way that truly motivates and inspires them makes them potentially orders of magnitude more effective as learners.