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> Homework should be optional material for self study

At Caltech, homework was assigned but had no bearing on your grade. The grades were based on the midterm and final exams.

But not mastering the homework usually resulted in flunking the exams. There were "retch" sessions after each homework assignment that was staffed by a grad student, and the purpose was to help the students understand the homework problems. I knew only one person (Hal Finney) who was so smart he didn't need to do the homework.

I learned the hard way that the path to success was:

1. never miss a lecture, no matter what

2. take notes by hand during lecture

3. do the homework on time, and make sure you understand every problem. Take advantage of the retch sessions.

And that worked for me.

I've given this advice many times, and the ones who followed it did well. I only added "leave your laptop in your dorm room" for modern times.

The general pattern at Caltech was 2 hours of study for every hour of lecture. Which was quite a shock to me.

I'll add one more thing to this, given that my experience as a math major at SIU was that each hour of lecture was expected to carry four hours of studying: read and summarize the course's texts (additionally, for math courses, attempt the problems) before lecture.

I found that (1) I didn't need to take anywhere near as many notes during lecture and (2) I could ask way, way, way more relevant questions.

This also helped tremendously when it came to studying for the actuarial exams.

> 1. never miss a lecture, no matter what

As a student of a top-tier French Master's degree, I consulted with a teacher to deal with exhaustion and to ask for a class rescheduling for my case. Explaining my situation, the teacher looks at me and interjected:

—Waitwaitwait. You... you went to all lectures!?

And he was right. Rather than following the curriculum, I should have developed my taste for various engineering topics and only used the classes as entertainment.

I think the first semester, or at least half of that, you should go to every lecture until you develop taste for what's useful. By the time you do your master's you should have a good sense for what classes are serious and have useful lectures and where you can just cram last minute because it's a bullshit class and where you're better off studying from a textbook.

do you have any evidence that CalTech's pedagogy is immune to today's threats and trends in education everywhere else? (no)

Nope.

When I was there, a long time ago, exams were timed and were usually open book open note. Blue books were filled in. You were trusted to adhere by those rules, and most students did their exams in their dorm rooms.

The evidence that the students honored the rules was some exams resulted in a 50% failure rate.

As for me, I went there because I wanted to learn the material. I did not care about getting a diploma. (Mine is in the basement somewhere.) I did not take any "easy A" classes, because I wanted a return on my time and tuition investment. (Though, easy A classes were hard to find at Caltech.) I wasn't even going to attend graduation, but my parents showed up and I attended to please them.

The classes, year by year, were dependent on mastering the previous year's classes. So if you cheat with AI, you're digging yourself into a bigger and bigger hole. Caltech rewires your brain. If you don't learn the stuff, you're going to be one of those EEs who carries around a card with V=A*R, V/A=R, V/R=A printed on it.

That only works with competent lecturers. I can speak for my experience at a more mid university, where that would apply to about two thirds of the classes. For the remaining third, going to the lectures felt genuinely counterproductive and you could actually feel yourself losing braincells listening to the confused nonsense or classes held in English for Erasmus students by someone who could barely speak it coherently. It was just a complete waste of already little available time.

So the endgame was figuring out what the tests in previous years looked like (cause it was likely gonna be a copy paste affair), do a targeted study run for those exercises and 9/10 you would pass.

Naval Nuclear Power School had (maybe still does) this model 20 years ago as well. Pass rate for my class cohort was 28% over the entire 2 year pipeline.

We didn't call them retch sessions, and they were taught by the instructors though. We also were encouraged to peer tutor and since we were all restricted to one building the homework was always group work allowed.

Also had badges to track time spent in the building for required study hours, though some people gave up and just slept at their desks when they started sliding down the grade scale and the hours racked up.

Generally I think I did 30 hours of studying/homework (went up and down depending on what was being taught, but was around that) a week (for 12-15 hours of actual lecturing), with some of my friends putting in 50% more. Generally the only day we weren't there was Saturdays. Most of the day Sunday was usually spent in class preparing for the next week.

I think only a third or so of my class wound up graduating. Caltech doesn't flunk people out. What happens is students will transfer to easier schools, or drop out, or decide driving a truck is more to their liking.

Likewise at Oxford - only the final exams counted (though you had to pass first year exams to continue to the second year).

But you had tutorials each week, and if your tutors thought you weren't doing enough work they could set you exams mid-course called 'penal collections' and if you failed them you could be thrown out. They were rare but definitely not unknown.

Unlimited retakes would be an enormous amount of work for professors/TAs/teachers.

Optional homework is often a disaster. At best, students would do it right before an exam and the goal of education is not to just pass exams. They’d probably still get a lower score than if they did the homework when they were supposed to.

What I think is better is to have a due date, but just make the maximum 10% each day it is late. So after 2 days, the highest score you could receive would be 80%.

I liked that system because it gave some flexibility with deadlines while still encouraging you to turn things in on time.

Late work policies like this can be a logistical nightmare at scale. Rather than play the penalty-over-time game, have hard deadlines that are inflexible. Students don't have to engage in mental gymnastics with their scores and instructors don't need to track this stuff.

My view is this: a student can turn in an incomplete assignment. Work they completed get evaluated and graded. Anything not completed gets zero credit. Homework should be an investment in effort over time anyway. Unfortunately, procrastination is a deeply rooted problem that usually kills this.

You put way too much faith in kids' desire to learn and their ability to make responsible choices.

> Homework should be optional material for self study, evaluated by teachers if you choose to do it but never forced.

My wife is a teacher and her school does this. The result is that nobody does homework. The kids who need the extra practice don't get it and they fall into a spiral of failure and apathy. This is especially bad for subjects like math that build on themselves.

IMO the better solution is to require and grade shorter homework and provide students with optional, supplementary assignments that can be used to make up for missed credit on homework for the same material. That way students who grasp the material quickly can demonstrate and move on while others who need practice are naturally encouraged to get it without being permanently punished for struggling initially.

Homework is no longer useful in the era of AI. Options are: treat kids like they are able to make responsible choices, and accept that much more of them will fail; or, keep the charade of grading AI-"assisted" homework and push kids farther along the track, even though they definitely don't know enough.

I much prefer the first.

School shouldn't be impossible, but you shouldn't have a charade of schooling.

Obviously, extra practice is a good idea.

It's not necessarily useless. If you make assignments short, provide some time in school to work on it, and do not allow students to use devices with access to general-purpose "AI", then there is a good chance most students will do the work like they're supposed to. Some will still cheat, but it's foolish to reorganize everything around the few who stubbornly refuse to learn.

> provide some time in school to work on it

Assignments students do in class isn't "homework". It's just classwork. All my math classes had both.

Perhaps you mean study halls? Those were uncommon until highschool where I grew up. And most of the time people spent there was not studying.

What you described about exams is like how I approach most certification exams: go through a test bank of questions until I get 80% then take the real test.

It's all cute but naively glances over what this all boils to - competition.

Education system, contrary to popular belief/name, isn't tailored to educate but to select winners and losers which then will be picked on the job market.

That's why it seems absurd when you think about it as an institution that aims to educate. That's because that isn't the real purpose of it. The purpose is to stratify and classify early.

Schools do not operate in a vacuum; they serve as credentialing gatekeepers for a hyper-competitive capitalist job market. If everyone could easily retake exams until they got an A, grades would lose their primary utility for employers and universities: differentiation. Society relies on schools to provide a neat hierarchy of candidates that for one reason or another thrived in difficult environment of adolescent schooling.

The system often prioritizes compliance, endurance of boredom, and social maneuvering over actual critical thinking precisely because those traits align with corporate hierarchies.

> compliance, endurance of boredom, and social maneuvering

Compliance and endurance of boredom I can somewhat agree with (thought not to a great extent), but social manoeuvring? As long as a student completes their classwork and homework, and does well in their exams (none of which mandate any social interaction apart from team projects), they easily pass through the school system. In fact, I used to hear about how the school system disproportionately benefited studious, shut-in students over street-wise, socially-savvy ones.

Yeah but if you get bullied due to lack of social skills then you won’t have mental energy nor drive for passing exams or any learning.

Socially savvy students on the other hand will get plenty of help from teachers and other students even if they are not so good themselves.

This is why the so called “intelligence” where I will define it as skill of acquiring skills right now, is not so important for success. You can be very good at learning but if your social aptitude and charisma sucks then you will just end up as depressed, miserable and poor and probably alone too.

If you have a kid It’s honestly very important and way more important than homeworks or exams, to care about kid’s social development and how you can help so your kid gains social confidence and never loses it at crucial moments

> If you try and force kids to study when they don't want to "for their own good" you're not actually helping them. Everyone needs to find their own path. Let people fail.

this rhetoric is pretending to be an alternative to coercion. IMO the ideas you are talking about are well trodden and are still coercion nonetheless.

Coercion explains it perfectly. A lot of kids see no future because of the environment they live in, so they have exactly zero motivation to study

I could be mistaken but my interpretation is that "studying for your own good" is being contrasted with "studying so you don't fail". If you actually fail students, they'll have a second motivation beyond trusting some authority figure's advice. Namely consequences.

You are missing the point. Getting a certificate for all of the programs you passed and still graduating could completely change the course of a person’s life. Community college has certificates and associates degrees to let people start working when they reach a practical limit in their general education.

> If you try and force kids to study when they don't want to "for their own good" you're not actually helping them. Everyone needs to find their own path. Let people fail.

This simply does not work for most, as pupils are too immature. You put sunscreen on children, keep them away from the street and brush their teeth. Having everyone re-learn the same stupid lesson is wasteful, it's better to institutionalize this knowledge in the form of mandatory participation.

The study was done in China, where making the class easier to improve pass rates isn't really a thing, as the Gaokao operates more like a stack ranking where it doesn't matter much how well you did in an absolute sense, only that not too many others who did better than you are competing for the same spot. Unlimited retakes are possible in theory, except each costs you a year of your life and except for some extreme cases of repeat test-takers, most people are going to give up after just one or two bad results. Homework is definitely not optional, but going home from school is. (Due to the hukou system, children often have to go to school far from where their parents work, so boarding schools with teacher-supervised self-study are common.) I don't see how holding back for individual classes is supposed to work considering scheduling conflicts.

> Grades should come from hard randomized exams with unlimited retakes

Exams will have to be a lot longer if you allow unlimited retakes. Generally exams work on a sample principle, but this breaks with retakes.

> F students will realize they have to study, start actually learning and then pass on the second time

Do you have evidence for this beyond your friends (who were accepted into college)?