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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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