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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I was a constant frustration to teachers in high school because I would do well on tests, but I wouldn't do the homework [1]. I'm kind of glad that I didn't know you could pay people to do your homework, since I have to admit that it would have been tempting to do that. I would like to think I would be above that, but it's easy to act high and mighty when you've never been tested.

Similarly, I'm very glad that I finished my undergrad before ChatGPT or Claude was released. It would have been overwhelmingly tempting to get AI to do everything.

For this one I actually do know I would be able to resist that urge, because I only got my masters a year ago and I was able to do that without using generative AI [2].

[1] I wish I had a good excuse for this. I regret not taking high school seriously now.

[2] With the exception of getting ChatGPT to generate BibTeX citations because Easybib is terrible.

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As another student who did the same, I similarly regret it, but also realize if I were put in the exact same scenario I would have behaved identically.

I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.

I ended up doing well enough: I dual-majored in CS and Math in undergrad and then completed a PhD in CS later in life, but I do sometimes think I could have achieved even more had I known better.

> I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.

Yeah, I passed the Calc 1 AP exam in my Junior year the first time around but I failed the class because I didn't do the homework. I was simultaneously retaking Calc 1 online while taking Calc 2 in school.

I don't think anyone ever disputed that I was good at math in school, that was relatively easy to prove, but I was decidedly not good at school itself. I did mediocre in high school and poorly in college the first time around, though I did eventually complete a bachelors and masters.

I was part of a PhD program but I never finished, but I have had a reasonably good career in software engineering. I do wish that I had taken school more seriously when I was younger, but things worked out ok so alls well that ends well.

> I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.

I loved one of my early math teachers that caught that out in his statistics. If you started to slip down the slope of "great exams and no homework" he'd reach out and give you an offer-in-compromise to change your grading to exams-only, with the compromise that you can only attain a maximum of a B grade to be fair to those that complete the exams and homework in the course.

I took my B.

I’m a bit baffled by how one could learn math without doing the homework. In my experience the homework is how you learn the math! So the exams would essentially already be testing whether you did the homework.

I was always very active during class, primarily because I would get bored and smartphones didn't exist yet so the only way I could entertain myself was raising my hand for the teacher all the time. I think because of this I was absorbing more than the average student. I probably would have absorbed even more if I had done the homework.

This is why I think I frustrated teachers; I was active in class and clearly willing and able to learn, and clearly based on the tests I was learning this well enough, but they would be kind of forced to give me shitty grades. To be clear, I do not blame the teachers for this at all, that's all on me. They were doing what they had to do.

I think it also helped that my both my parents, and especially my dad, are pretty big math geeks, so even when I was relatively young my dad would be showing me interesting math stuff even outside school.

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