> If you merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you learned wouldn't be on the test. It's not good books you want to read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class.
It is the professor's job to decide which parts of medieval history are the most important to learn. Therefore, those are what I need to study.
Maybe not all professors do this effectively—but as long as we're talking about ideals, this is how it should work.
I think we should just drop book work questions altogether and allow students to take notes into the exam. Just make the tests about analysis and synthesis, which is the stuff you should be able to do if you truly understood something and didn't just memorize some facts.
In classes I have seen, things you could ignore were minority of it and usually side stuff like funny anecdotes, minor players that are there for you to get feel for the context, famous nun dick tree and such.
This stuff helps you learn important stuff and makes it all less dry, but it absolutely does not make sense to penalize students for not learning it actively.
Yeah, this came across to me as overly simplistic not really thought out argument too. I dont think that college medieval history not being the "students can pick any part of it and anything you learn about medieval history is good to go" is some kind of massive issue with medieval history course.
It does not mean that you did not learned or that grade does not measure learning. It just means the topic is not whole medieval history (which would be ridiculously broad) but only selected parts of it.
It is kind of like complaining that algorithms 101 are allowing students to pick any algorithms to learn and require everyone to learn the same set of algorithms.
Autodidacts often end up reading a bunch of stuff from here and there with sub-par results. One of the main benefits of a (university) course is focus and guidance. That the prof or teacher selects specific topics they deem important for that stage of education. As a student it can be difficult to judge that yourself.
Studying, getting hired, career promotions, raising funds... It’s all about beating the system. You’re evaluated based on certain criteria and you optimize for those.
We (Screenhero, W13) may well have been one of the many YC companies PG’s referring to! But instead of hoping there was some test to hack, we were worried that there was some unknown hack out there that we didn’t know. It was quite a huge relief when PG told us something to the effect of “all the successful startups have found their initial grown through just one thing: delighting their users with a great product”.
That realization / confirmation freed us four engineering cofounders from worrying about some “growth hack” we never learnt, and helped us focus on prioritizing our product development through talking to users. We then used Sean Ellis’ “very disappointed” survey methodology (which Rahul @ Superhman recently wrote about) and used it as our North Star to find the few features to focus on polishing.
We got acquired by Slack in 2015, and built out Slack Calls. I left last year, and I’m now in the final stages of launching a new product around super-charged meetings for remote teams (picking up where Screenhero / Slack Calls / Zoom left off), and am using the same principles again. No hacking of tests, just building a product that people want, and using their feedback as the only valuable bit of data in determining priorities. Thanks PG and YC (and Sean Ellis!) for startup principles and methodologies that have stood the test of time.
I never cared about grades, but I was never very good or very bad. Just slightly above average
In academia, having good grades is sometimes helpful to climb the ladder. Not all people can study medicine. Not all people can get a master degree.
Often these gigs are given to the best students only, but sometimes you can circumvent the grading issue by waiting longer, going to the military, be friends with a prof. or working for free.
I think you are falling for the fallacy that the essay is trying to expose?
Surely those that pass medicine are those that are good at medicine exams. Plenty of people would make great doctors that don’t due to the exam system, not due to a lack of capability.
The real world is very much about optimizing for and beating tests.
It might be producing a specific CV or preparing for an interview whiteboard session to land a job.
It might be socializing and networking in a specific way in order to land funding.
The real world does not commonly reward just being really good at arbitrary things. It's almost always focused on meeting a need that someone else has defined, much like a test.
There is truth to this. It reflects the shift of mentality in tech entrepreneurs since the 2000s (experimentally entrepreneurial, introverted hackers, libertarian) to the 2010s (work for FANG or make a feature that FANG wants to buy, well-curated github and social media, social justice).
I could dare say that this mentality flowed from academia to the greater economy. Academic funding has been generally formalistic and test-driven for decades.
It's not the real world - its the human world. The real world is very different, and getting more so imho. Skills to survive the human world are usually useless in the real physical world. It's a distinction I read recently from a philosopher that I lost track of, maybe someone here knows. Her point was (I think) that when someone says the real world, with relation to education, it's not really - it's the world of human systems that are very much open to degradation and corruption, and they can be changed.
In the context of this discussion, the rewards do not come from "the physical world" but from other humans (money) , so generic mountain-survival skills are irrelevant
Agreed. Life is a series of tests. The big difference between life and school, is that it is usually much harder in life to anticipate what is going to be tested. That is where the real skill lies.
When a startup prioritizes feature A over feature B, they are making a decision on what is going to be tested by customers. The startup then optimizes for passing the anticipated test.
Being successful academic is all about optimizing for various tests and metrics and beating tests. It would be hard to find more institutionalized occupation.
There is a predictable component to the market. When we exchange articles about "how we did $something-entrepreneurish right and reaped rewards", we're essentially trading exam questions from previous years.
> The real world is very much about optimizing for and beating tests.
thank you.
it's awesome for someone like PG to bring the subject upfront. but what you are saying resonates with me.
genuine interest is missing in our field, and to some extent many others. "beating tests", as PG puts it, is at all time high. i am at a point where i don't know who or what is right.
the numbers are telling an important story! those who learned to hack the tests or the system are popular online or offline. and they are "succeeding" in life. they seem to have outnumbered those who put genuine interest first.
for instance, as many of my peers, i wanna learn machine learning and AI. but it is hard for me to find materials that resonate with me. materials that teach from first principles like those that got me hooked back in the days. they are lacking because we are so good at shortcuts and hacking. maybe we don't know how to do it anymore?
but who am i to blame anyone? there are so many, many, ways to hack and beat the tests and the system. and seemingly you can get ahead of many others in life by doing so. #AceYourFirstInterviewAfterBootcamp #TensorflowPyTorch #BeSureToLikeBelow #ThanksToMyPatreons #SubForChatAndEmojis #InstagramFacebookDown
i am very thankful for PG for starting the discussion. and for this comment.
So while I agree with what he is saying directly, to me, testing is a function of filtering at large scale. To a secondary degree, measuring as feedback for that system.
Testing and grades in general are a society level filtering mechanism and is a measuring proxy for how the work force filters for candidates at the entry level. As most know, once you've got about 10 years, most of that is largely ignored at the bottom of your resume.
Entrepreneurs, in the eyes of this system, are deviants of sorts. Hacks who couldn't/didn't want to make it in the system, but turns out that system is not the only way. A non-western example of this are a lot of the families that came up in money in China the past few decades. They didn't make it in the rigor of Chinese school system, but when they said fuck-it, I'll survive by starting something, they were wildly successful.
Controversially there's evidence pointing to education doesn't help people at scale[1]. So that whole structure, debatably, has diminishing returns.
So, I agree with Paul Graham 100%, schooling isn't the only way, and I mean that by - if my children decide they do not want to attend school anymore because they have a plan that, while unconventional, can do great things; Support all the way.
I can't find whose quote it is that "the most difficult thing is to teach people to think simply".
Unfortunately education cannot test that, because tests are by definition testing only a fragment of a system. Knowing and understanding one thing end-to-end is meaningful knowledge, and qualitatively better than knowing fragments of 100 things. Perhaps you can assess the former by grading a diploma thesis on a very specific subject. Tests may have an important role in motivating students to delve more deeply in subjects but they don't go beyond that.
There's similarly more value to knowing some technology "end-to-end" rather than specializing in only one level and never understanding what's below.
It's also interesting to read this:
> There are now ways to get rich by doing good work, and that's part of the reason people are so much more excited about getting rich than they used to be.
Which may reflect how things were 15 years ago. There were 2 threads in "Ask HN" last week which basically concluded that these days you're much better off (money wise) working for an uncreative role in FANG.
the gordian knot is more of a brutish non-solution to a hard problem. "thinking simply" is more about developing intuitive understanding to the point where you can also explain it simply
> Tests may have an important role in motivating students to delve more deeply in subjects but they don't go beyond that.
I feel like the university doesn't allow for time to stroll from the beaten path and explore topics that you're interested in. Most people I talked to have a very stressful studying experience. You know people care about your grade in the end, and you pay a lot of money for your degree. So it makes sense to also spent the majority of your time to learn the course material in and out.
It's exactly the same with hiring at FANG/McKinsey/BCG/... :). You optimize for the (well known) interview process. You study 10 hours/day for 2 weeks. And you get the job with 99% accuracy.
I think the elephant in the room is the question of purpose. What is the purpose guiding your actions? Getting good grades is a mean that /can/ be necessary to achieve the purpose you have chosen in life. But it’s not sufficient for most purposes. On the other hand, once you have a purpose, you truly make the most of education.
TL; DR;
Einstein said sth along the lines of "Don't let your education get in the way of your knowledge."
Finish uni with high grades then spend the rest of your life learning.
> Finish uni with high grades then spend the rest of your life learning.
I'd rather not waste 30% of my life on that nonsense. Better to use uni for what it is meant for: Learn whatever seems interesting and don't mind the grades.
My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we have to take care that his interest doesn’t go south.
During school holidays, he actually starts to do school exercises for fun; those are the very same exercises he would fight against doing for hours on a regular school day. Go figure.
Btw, Gates, Page, Brin - all were not in a conventional school. The capacity to just build things without fear of being judged is invaluable.
We thought the same way but it’s difficult to replace the social component. Still it’s hard to see how bad the school system is and force our kids to participate. It could be so much better.
Look for an unschooling school, strange as that may sound. Free democratic and Sudbury Valley model are some of the things to search for. There aren't many around but the numbers are increasing.
We send our son to one. It's a leap of faith; the kids essentially "do whatever". But it seems worth it compared to the damage done by middle and high school. And the kids that I've seen come out of this school seem to do well in society (and college) and generally seem much more mature than high school graduates.
I went to a "traditional Montessori" school for a few months when I was very young. Long story short, their educational method insisted that we needed instruction in how to play with toys before we were allowed to do so, and we needed to do so on mats, which needed to be rolled up tidily at the end of the prescribed playtime.
The problem with that was that we already knew what Legos were. But we were supposed to pretend we didn't, in order to appease the teacher.
I think this was the same school that insisted to my parents that I couldn't read because they (the school) hadn't taught me to read. My parents taught me to read. So they had me demonstrate, and the teacher decided my parents must have... trained me to pretend to read.
Agile Learning Centers and Liberated Learners are inspiring networks of small schools in this vein (and both less dogmatic than Sudbury - in a good way, IMO).
All true known and well established. But homeschooling requires a parent to sacrifice anything else and be devoted for that. Not an easy decision. It's much easier to find a good school!
They both attended Montessori schools. [0][1][2][3][4][5][6]
The person who mentioned waldorf must have been confused. While they’re both small private schools, they are two very different approaches to education.
I remember this history teacher who was a breath of fresh air. He told us in advance his test where very simple. And the reason was quite genius: if you just listened and took a few notes here and there, you’d pass the test. Which freed the mind to really absorb the knowledge and have fun with the subject matter. He was also very good in discerning knowledge and teaching why a certain topic was good to know. I think I remember more from those classes than any other.
I had a software security class that was taught in effectively the same way. The professor knew they had to give grades so they just set it up such that the midterm and final accounted for the bulk of the grade and made them really easy. This ensured that almost all students would get at least a B using conventional brute Force studying methods. This removed all of the traditional grade optimizing pressures. He then made the homeworks and labs quite difficult and made them require a lot of independent research so that you could be free to try hard and potentially fall short without fear of getting owned. You would basically get out of the class what you put in. It has so far been my favorite class in my program, the one I learned the most from, and one of the most empowering classes I've taken.
Sounds good, but I could easily see this backfire with students that have been taught to hack the system: "Great, we're getting an easy pass here, let's spend zero time on it and focus on those other subjects that require rote memorising"
it can boil down to "doing" vs "being". It's a topic often discussed in spiritual circles. You can consider it a thought experiment if that works for you. Or if you are Steve Jobs fan read some Yogananda.
I just didn't do my homework and got bad grades. Luckily in my country you can always get in via standardized tests instead of grades so I did well in life anyway. I'm not sure why homework is weighed so heavily in grades, it mostly just shows how much free time the students are willing to sacrifice. The biggest cost this had for me was the guilt that I hadn't done what I was supposed to do, which made me feel like a bad person, but in hindsight I did much better than most of my more studious peers so it really wasn't all that important.
And many of those turn out tons of successful people you’ve heard of, too. Bet the ones that do so at the highest rate tend to be among the most expensive.
Yes it has been shown that having successful friends will make yourself more successful. Putting your kid into a school for rich people will more likely lead to rich friends later on.
True, it‘s just worth bearing in mind that deviating from the ordinary school system can indeed work.. kids will not automatically fail miserably if they don’t do tests or homework. That was the belief my mother (who was a teacher) ingrained in me, and I actually have to convince myself on a regular basis that life without the standard school system could also work out.
> but as long as he is in school, we have to take care that his interest doesn’t go south. [...] During school holidays, he actually starts to do school exercises for fun; those are the very same exercises he would fight against doing for hours on a regular school day. Go figure.
That does not sound like exercises themselves would be bad or that he would cease to be interested in learning overall.
It more sounds like after many hours at school, he wants to do different things that day. But when school is not present, he seeks similar activities and his willingness to learn is not deteriorated. That kind of sounds healthy and not wrong at all. In school, kids spend a lot of time learning or doing focused activities, a kid wanted to just play after that should not be sign of something grave.
The only thing that is wrong or unusual is the hours long fight against homework. I dont think that is normal for majority of kids. Only some parents I know report that much daily fights, most have fight here and there once in a while only.
My parents and teachers gave up on attempting to assign me homework and make me do it. I despised homework. Interesting assignments were great! But day to day homework? Never did it, which isn’t a good thing (and this isn’t me attempting to brag).
The only reason they stopped is I was getting top marks in every subject anyway, and the only reason I had that was I had a tutor who pushed me so far beyond high school level that I was finally interested in the topics again.
The neat part was: to learn those topics, she gave me a crash course of most of the year 11 and year 12 curriculum in 3 or 4 months or so, because I needed the base knowledge to learn the cool stuff
That’s the big issue. We‘re thinking about Karate/swimming/chess etc courses, but ideally you would have access to a community of unschoolers. Some big cities have this, but currently not an option for us.
I think sports are pretty good at forcing kids outside of their comfort zone. I definently didnt like it as a kid, but it honestly made me grow so much.
> it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance
I am curious, is this about some particular kind of homework? From my own experience, I would think that exercising a subject alone (which is what most homework was in my school system at least) is a very good way of understanding it better. I of course remember not wanting to do homework many times, and I remember excessive or idiotic homework assignments, but overall homework seemed to be one of the major modes of learning for me.
Also, related to Gates, Page, Brin - I don't generally think that it's a good idea to look at a small number of very successful people and try to emulate some part of their life experience - you are, în general, very likely to fall for some kind of survivorship bias, or accidentally home in on a less important detail (for example, Gates was probably helped much more by his extremely wealthy and well-connected family than any particular aspect of his schooling).
On the other hand, there are many voices saying that one of the important purposes of the public education system is to engender conformity, which is very rarely conducive to a truly out of the ordinary life. Noam Chomsky would be one of the most credible, and he has often credited his own career to his non-standard early schooling.
The homework has to be just easy enough that every kid can do it, which means that for many kids, it's mainly a test of focus and motivation. This is all the more prevalent today, when homework has turned into drill work for the questions on the standardized tests.
I've got two kids, and so I can attest from limited anecdotal evidence, that it's completely unpredictable how each kid will relate to homework.
> Gates, ... - all were not in a conventional school
wikipedia said he went to a regular private school then went to Harvard which sounds pretty conventional. Yeah he didn't finish, but worry about that later.
Theres truth to the OPs statement. Some online sources say gates attended Montessori for elementary but it's not conclusive. Brin and page for sure attended Montessori. Bezos as well. I went to a Montessori until 5th grade and honestly didnt think it was anything special. Probably because they mixed a lot of traditional school elements in as well.
Alternative option, tell the school he's not doing homework - they're providing a service to parents to aid with a child education, if that's not aiding then change the contract.
FWIW the UK Education Act actually enshrines this concept (parents are responsible for a child being educated), though this has been eroded considerably by Tory policy in the last decade or so. We did tell our primary school "don't expect homework from $child[0]" one year, they didn't complain. However we also wanted to do flexschooling and the head refused it, which I'm still smarting over and consider to have been a significant detriment.
That same primary school ditched regular style homework in favour of projects, which $child[1] wants to do, and we can decide easily to curtail the time used doing it if we want. It's a great way of doing homework IMO; very child-centric.
It's worth contemplating. We homeschooled our kids and it was a good choice for our family.
I'm sympathetic to unschooling, but I've also seen it go wrong. If you decide to unschool, don't be dogmatic about it. Feel free to be more or less unschooly if that seems to be needed. Don't get sucked into a community where unschooling "purity" is highly valued.
Your comment jumped out at me, my wife and I are homeschooling/unschooling and some of people we've met focus on "purity" and all I can think when I talk with them is, "The point isn't to completely avoid anything that looks like schoolwork, the point is to guide the children to learn more than they would have otherwise."
Yup. Unschooling has some tendency to become an ideology instead of a practical point of view, and people get stuck in it. When all your homeschooling friends are stuck in it too, it becomes hard to get out of it even when it's not working well.
Don't know about Page and Brin, but according to the Netflix documentary Gates won state-level math Olympiad at a level three grades higher than his own. So he wasn't a modal child. You can't draw any conclusions from that about education at scale.
You actually can: if he had a better level of education than everyone else, why wouldn't he do better than people taking traditional educational paths?
As someone who participated in many academic competitions as a child, the winners were consistently weighted 9:1 private:public.
No, you cannot. IQ is highly correlated with wealth and is also highly heritable. So in all likelihood what you've observed is that smart kids win academic competitions, and also happen to be from rich families. If you take a bunch of kids with an IQ of 100 (or 115, or even 130) and put them into private schools they'll do a little better but they won't be winning any academic competitions.
That article doesn't seem relevant. 'Poverty impedes cognitive function' is entirely compatible with 'IQ is highly correlated with wealth and is also highly heritable', and with the claim that private school can't make a genius out of a kid who lacks an extremely high IQ.
edit: maybe I misunderstood, and you only were only pointing out that some potential-genius kids have that potential stifled by poverty. But that doesn't seem to be the original point of disagreement.
On the first page, the breakdown is 23 kids from public schools, 7 kids from private schools, 4 kids listing some sort of math circle / whatever Arateem is, 5 kids listing universities (home schooled/taking uni courses? No idea). Possibly a few of the private school kids are on scholarship. The 7 kids go to 4 schools.
I don't think students are the blameless victim of this "system". I know of a continuous evaluation system adopted in a college, where the final tests had a less than 50% weightage for the grade. Thr students rebelled. It was far easier for a majority to burn the midnight oil for a few weeks than be diligent through the course. The test model has stuck because it's convenient for everyone, regardless of its clear weaknesses.
I'm one of those weird outliers I guess, but even when there were only 1-2 exams for the whole course I stayed diligent throughout. The night before a test I just did a bit of review, and got a good nights sleep. I never understood those who tried to cram because it's not something that would ever work for how I learn and understand.
This is a very interesting thing to think about, I thought about it a bunch of times already, and have a couple of thoughts about it too.
First of all, once you're 55, it's easy to say stuff like that, because you won't be tested anymore. And I think there is a good chunk of survivorship bias: "Hey, I made it without worrying about tests, so you can, too!" Although that is probably not true for a big chunk of the population, especially once we look at non CS people.
Then I think, he is fundamentally right. Grades shouldn't matter so much, it is about what you learn. And I like to approach things that way too, but in the end, I always have to study for the tests as well.
The problem is exactly how deeply it is ingrained in everything. If I just stop caring, it doesn't really help. I will just end up in a worse position, since everyone around me still cares about test results. The people that need to change their mind are the people that use tests as measures of qualities that they are not a good measure for. I think a lot of people are falling thought the cracks because they don't fit the expectation of a HR person close enough.
In the end, we will always have to have tests. A completely individualized assessment of peoples qualities or fit for certain roles just doesn't scale. It would be great though to come up with new ways of testing that are maybe more in line with actual learning. For example, it would be nice to have tests at university where I can google things, just like in the real world.
I am lucky enough to be able to work in the booming tech sector where there are so many jobs that it is fine if I don't work towards a test.
> For example, it would be nice to have tests at university where I can google things, just like in the real world.
One of the best professors I had at university for a Linux course always said: “If you don’t know something, google it!”
He backed up his words by allowing googling on the actual coding part of his exams. You had to understand the underlying concepts but you never had to memorize syntax. One time, he had us write a small program in C that involved threading during a proctored timed exam. Everyone ran out of time for that part.
His course and exams were _rigorous_. You could never cram for his class and expect to pass and indeed I know of one student repeatedly failing his course.
This was one of the courses in university where I gained the bulk of my useful knowledge and practical skills I use to this day. I can count the courses that were of similar quality I took at university on one(1) hand. The rest of my degree involved hackable tests, apathetic professors and were massive time-wasters. I learned nothing from them, obviously.
The good professors made me realize how bad the rest of my degree was and how much of a racket higher education could be.
I look back at my undergrad days and wonder how much more I would have learned if I had not focused so much on grades. I’m still actively trying to unschool myself.
> He backed up his words by allowing googling on the actual coding part of his exams. You had to understand the underlying concepts but you never had to memorize syntax. ... His course and exams were _rigorous_. You could never cram for his class and expect to pass and indeed I know of one student repeatedly failing his course.
When I studied law, all our exams were open book. Bring whatever you want. I brought casebooks and printouts of legislation and important cases. Others also brought headnotes and volumes of Halsbury's (a legal encyclopaedia).
None of this helped if you didn't know the material well enough to identify the legal issues in each question.
> None of this helped if you didn’t know the material well enough to identify the legal issues in each question.
My machine learning professor who was from CMU would allow us to put anything we wanted on both sides of one piece of printer paper to bring to exams.
No amount of notes helped if you had no understanding of the algorithms and formulas.
I almost failed that course too, but it was also one of the cornerstones of my university career. It made me realize how much I had been optimizing for the wrong thing: grades instead of understanding.
>"Hey, I made it without worrying about tests, so you can, too!"
To be fair he did say "For me, as for most students, the measurement of what I was learning completely dominated actual learning in college. I was fairly earnest; I was genuinely interested in most of the classes I took, and I worked hard. And yet I worked by far the hardest when I was studying for a test."
>I think a lot of people are falling thought the cracks because they don't fit the expectation of a HR person close enough.
In retrospect I'm sure this was the case for me. It's probably why I ended up starting my own business.
Interesting essay, however it is written from a perspective of having basic needs met and having the resources to spend time 'hacking' a system. When you are struggling to pay the bills for the basics, you don't focus on the hacking just on the surviving.
The question I have is how do you hack the system such that you help those who are struggling to survive?
This is great seeing so many PG essays! I've really missed his writing.
> And at elite universities, that means nearly everyone, since someone who didn't care about getting good grades probably wouldn't be there in the first place. The result is that students compete to maximize the difference between learning and getting good grades.
> When I started advising startup founders at Y Combinator, especially young ones, I was puzzled by the way they always seemed to make things overcomplicated.
I suspect part of the problem (of early founders being focused on hacking tests) was related to how heavily YC funded people from elite universities—which select people who do exactly that.
> This is great seeing so many PG essays! I've really missed his writing.
I love reading his tweets! They're all so down to earth and illuminating. That said, I'm not a fan of his blog writing as much. I find it full of overly-sparse nuggets of wisdom. It needs to be more concise, to the point, with fewer clever metaphors. This article could've been compressed 70% and still have been human readable.
pg seems to have a backlog of essay ideas that he's catching up on. This is all good, but also means that they get written a bit too quickly. It's the classic "had I had more time to spend on this text, it would have been shorter" syndrome.
I've read the article in full. It raises an important point, but it's indeed a laborious read. As I read it, the haunting paragraph from The Elements of Style came to mind:
"Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
- - -
If you enjoy the essay form, I highly recommend the "Essays of E.B. White" (yes, the same White of The Elements of Style). Some of the essays stay with you for a long time.
And yet I’ve interviewed with 2 or 3 different y combinator companies that hire based on coding tests that test nothing other than that you’ve memorized “cracking the coding interview”.
> No one was pulling all-nighters two weeks into the semester.
As a physics student, I can say we definitely pulled 2am-ers 2 weeks into the semester. Our Condensed Matter professor gave us some of the most random questions that no one could anticipate. To be honest, I was one of those "diligent" students who got good grades. I'll tell you right now his quizzes were not hackable. The following held true:
|quiz subject matter| >> |lecture matter|
He tested on the former, so we had no way of memorizing or hacking the quiz. You had to really understand the concepts to do well on his quizzes. Ditto for my grad Quantum Mechanics class.
On the other hand, I've also had professors who give exams pulled from the internet and allow use of the internet while taking those exams. I hacked that immediately during the exam, then almost got in trouble for it.
> ...if the professor tells you that there were three underlying causes of the Schism of 13... you'd better know them.
A professor like my Condensed Matter Physics professor would go on and on about 3 fundamental causes and then quiz students about the 5 fundamental causes, giving a zero to anyone who couldn't think of all the base 3, then grading the remaining students who thought creatively of 2 additional causes
against each other on a bell curve. :)
> A professor like my Condensed Matter Physics professor would go on and on about 3 fundamental causes and then quiz students about the 5 fundamental causes, giving a zero to anyone who couldn't think of all the base 3, then grading the remaining students who thought creatively of 2 additional causes against each other on a bell curve. :)
To me, this sounds like a plausible argument against such tests.
The issue of creatively grading responses to an ill-defined question often pops up in discussion here about interview practices. In those discussions, typically someone will say “I don’t do a generic whiteboard interview. Instead I do [idiosyncratic thing x]. It really gives me amazing insight into the candidate.”
Then someone else says “Yeah right, a weird test with unclear metrics just gives you a big empty space to fill in with all your biases and pick someone who answers the way you would”.
Of course, both sides are exaggerated here. But it’s not clear to me that “creative” tests are necessarily any better.
This spends too many words justifying the stale "real hacker" tradition of dunking on education, and kindof ignores the problem of how to measure something so subjective as learning.
So people who are good at tests get ahead. We get that you're not interested in grades. We all know people who play the game and win, not sincerely engage with their job or education or whatever.
But I'd like to hear from pg / other people in YC how they think they are "hacked". What do their successful applicants actually optimise for when "delight" and even "growth" are just as subjective as "learning"? After all they fund lots and lots of companies and founders, many of whom make no returns. How do founders keep their funding "success" long past the point it was deserved?
I've worked in tech for quite a while now. I used to buy into the meritocracy cant but as the years wore on, I realized how much bullshit it was.
I think the biggest moment came when I started to think about how to explain to people in my new home, South Africa, that working in tech would free you economically. There's some truth to that. But that's not the whole truth.
The truth is that all those years ago when I got my first coding job in financial services, I ticked 3 important boxes for the interview: white, male, and university-educated.
You are derailing the discussion and I hope you get downvoted into oblivion
Besides that: The (classical) financial industry (banks and insurances) has a relatively trival IT (of copying data around and displaying it). Combined with external pressure, they are -today- leading on progressive indicators, such as diversity, inclusion, near-shoring and far-shoring.
Bingo! The real problem is the using incorrect metrics. If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its entire life thinking it is stupid!
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadIt is the professor's job to decide which parts of medieval history are the most important to learn. Therefore, those are what I need to study.
Maybe not all professors do this effectively—but as long as we're talking about ideals, this is how it should work.
My college also did not have any old tests floating around, at least as far as I was aware.
This stuff helps you learn important stuff and makes it all less dry, but it absolutely does not make sense to penalize students for not learning it actively.
It does not mean that you did not learned or that grade does not measure learning. It just means the topic is not whole medieval history (which would be ridiculously broad) but only selected parts of it.
It is kind of like complaining that algorithms 101 are allowing students to pick any algorithms to learn and require everyone to learn the same set of algorithms.
Autodidacts often end up reading a bunch of stuff from here and there with sub-par results. One of the main benefits of a (university) course is focus and guidance. That the prof or teacher selects specific topics they deem important for that stage of education. As a student it can be difficult to judge that yourself.
That realization / confirmation freed us four engineering cofounders from worrying about some “growth hack” we never learnt, and helped us focus on prioritizing our product development through talking to users. We then used Sean Ellis’ “very disappointed” survey methodology (which Rahul @ Superhman recently wrote about) and used it as our North Star to find the few features to focus on polishing.
We got acquired by Slack in 2015, and built out Slack Calls. I left last year, and I’m now in the final stages of launching a new product around super-charged meetings for remote teams (picking up where Screenhero / Slack Calls / Zoom left off), and am using the same principles again. No hacking of tests, just building a product that people want, and using their feedback as the only valuable bit of data in determining priorities. Thanks PG and YC (and Sean Ellis!) for startup principles and methodologies that have stood the test of time.
In academia, having good grades is sometimes helpful to climb the ladder. Not all people can study medicine. Not all people can get a master degree.
Often these gigs are given to the best students only, but sometimes you can circumvent the grading issue by waiting longer, going to the military, be friends with a prof. or working for free.
I think you are falling for the fallacy that the essay is trying to expose?
Surely those that pass medicine are those that are good at medicine exams. Plenty of people would make great doctors that don’t due to the exam system, not due to a lack of capability.
Various quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/41319.John_Taylor_Ga...
The real world is very much about optimizing for and beating tests.
It might be producing a specific CV or preparing for an interview whiteboard session to land a job.
It might be socializing and networking in a specific way in order to land funding.
The real world does not commonly reward just being really good at arbitrary things. It's almost always focused on meeting a need that someone else has defined, much like a test.
I could dare say that this mentality flowed from academia to the greater economy. Academic funding has been generally formalistic and test-driven for decades.
It's not the real world - its the human world. The real world is very different, and getting more so imho. Skills to survive the human world are usually useless in the real physical world. It's a distinction I read recently from a philosopher that I lost track of, maybe someone here knows. Her point was (I think) that when someone says the real world, with relation to education, it's not really - it's the world of human systems that are very much open to degradation and corruption, and they can be changed.
is that a hard fact or wishful thinking?
In the context of this discussion, the rewards do not come from "the physical world" but from other humans (money) , so generic mountain-survival skills are irrelevant
When a startup prioritizes feature A over feature B, they are making a decision on what is going to be tested by customers. The startup then optimizes for passing the anticipated test.
If your ambition is being successful on your own, as an academic, an entrepreneur or as an artist, there are no standardized tests to beat.
thank you.
it's awesome for someone like PG to bring the subject upfront. but what you are saying resonates with me.
genuine interest is missing in our field, and to some extent many others. "beating tests", as PG puts it, is at all time high. i am at a point where i don't know who or what is right.
the numbers are telling an important story! those who learned to hack the tests or the system are popular online or offline. and they are "succeeding" in life. they seem to have outnumbered those who put genuine interest first.
for instance, as many of my peers, i wanna learn machine learning and AI. but it is hard for me to find materials that resonate with me. materials that teach from first principles like those that got me hooked back in the days. they are lacking because we are so good at shortcuts and hacking. maybe we don't know how to do it anymore?
but who am i to blame anyone? there are so many, many, ways to hack and beat the tests and the system. and seemingly you can get ahead of many others in life by doing so. #AceYourFirstInterviewAfterBootcamp #TensorflowPyTorch #BeSureToLikeBelow #ThanksToMyPatreons #SubForChatAndEmojis #InstagramFacebookDown
i am very thankful for PG for starting the discussion. and for this comment.
Testing and grades in general are a society level filtering mechanism and is a measuring proxy for how the work force filters for candidates at the entry level. As most know, once you've got about 10 years, most of that is largely ignored at the bottom of your resume.
Entrepreneurs, in the eyes of this system, are deviants of sorts. Hacks who couldn't/didn't want to make it in the system, but turns out that system is not the only way. A non-western example of this are a lot of the families that came up in money in China the past few decades. They didn't make it in the rigor of Chinese school system, but when they said fuck-it, I'll survive by starting something, they were wildly successful.
Controversially there's evidence pointing to education doesn't help people at scale[1]. So that whole structure, debatably, has diminishing returns.
So, I agree with Paul Graham 100%, schooling isn't the only way, and I mean that by - if my children decide they do not want to attend school anymore because they have a plan that, while unconventional, can do great things; Support all the way.
Unfortunately education cannot test that, because tests are by definition testing only a fragment of a system. Knowing and understanding one thing end-to-end is meaningful knowledge, and qualitatively better than knowing fragments of 100 things. Perhaps you can assess the former by grading a diploma thesis on a very specific subject. Tests may have an important role in motivating students to delve more deeply in subjects but they don't go beyond that.
There's similarly more value to knowing some technology "end-to-end" rather than specializing in only one level and never understanding what's below.
It's also interesting to read this:
> There are now ways to get rich by doing good work, and that's part of the reason people are so much more excited about getting rich than they used to be.
Which may reflect how things were 15 years ago. There were 2 threads in "Ask HN" last week which basically concluded that these days you're much better off (money wise) working for an uncreative role in FANG.
I feel like the university doesn't allow for time to stroll from the beaten path and explore topics that you're interested in. Most people I talked to have a very stressful studying experience. You know people care about your grade in the end, and you pay a lot of money for your degree. So it makes sense to also spent the majority of your time to learn the course material in and out.
I'd rather not waste 30% of my life on that nonsense. Better to use uni for what it is meant for: Learn whatever seems interesting and don't mind the grades.
During school holidays, he actually starts to do school exercises for fun; those are the very same exercises he would fight against doing for hours on a regular school day. Go figure.
Btw, Gates, Page, Brin - all were not in a conventional school. The capacity to just build things without fear of being judged is invaluable.
We send our son to one. It's a leap of faith; the kids essentially "do whatever". But it seems worth it compared to the damage done by middle and high school. And the kids that I've seen come out of this school seem to do well in society (and college) and generally seem much more mature than high school graduates.
I went to a "traditional Montessori" school for a few months when I was very young. Long story short, their educational method insisted that we needed instruction in how to play with toys before we were allowed to do so, and we needed to do so on mats, which needed to be rolled up tidily at the end of the prescribed playtime.
The problem with that was that we already knew what Legos were. But we were supposed to pretend we didn't, in order to appease the teacher.
I think this was the same school that insisted to my parents that I couldn't read because they (the school) hadn't taught me to read. My parents taught me to read. So they had me demonstrate, and the teacher decided my parents must have... trained me to pretend to read.
The person who mentioned waldorf must have been confused. While they’re both small private schools, they are two very different approaches to education.
[0] Wiki Brin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin
[1] Post Article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/montessori-lo...
[2] ABC Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C_DQxpX-Kw
[3] Wiki Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page
[4] Guardian Article: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/jul/23...
[5] BI Article: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-innovators-who-went-to-...
[6] Forbes Article: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-innovators-who-went-to-...
For me, I had to unlearn self judgement. This has helped so much over the last few years.
I just didn't do my homework and got bad grades. Luckily in my country you can always get in via standardized tests instead of grades so I did well in life anyway. I'm not sure why homework is weighed so heavily in grades, it mostly just shows how much free time the students are willing to sacrifice. The biggest cost this had for me was the guilt that I hadn't done what I was supposed to do, which made me feel like a bad person, but in hindsight I did much better than most of my more studious peers so it really wasn't all that important.
This is Anecdata^3, you probably shouldn't make rash decisions about your children based on 3 successful technical entrepreneurs.
https://fortune.com/2015/07/17/entrepreneurs-family-money/
That does not sound like exercises themselves would be bad or that he would cease to be interested in learning overall.
It more sounds like after many hours at school, he wants to do different things that day. But when school is not present, he seeks similar activities and his willingness to learn is not deteriorated. That kind of sounds healthy and not wrong at all. In school, kids spend a lot of time learning or doing focused activities, a kid wanted to just play after that should not be sign of something grave.
The only thing that is wrong or unusual is the hours long fight against homework. I dont think that is normal for majority of kids. Only some parents I know report that much daily fights, most have fight here and there once in a while only.
The only reason they stopped is I was getting top marks in every subject anyway, and the only reason I had that was I had a tutor who pushed me so far beyond high school level that I was finally interested in the topics again.
The neat part was: to learn those topics, she gave me a crash course of most of the year 11 and year 12 curriculum in 3 or 4 months or so, because I needed the base knowledge to learn the cool stuff
Most kids with good grades don't have tutor, unless they struggle a lot or it is before entrance tests for high school and college.
I am curious, is this about some particular kind of homework? From my own experience, I would think that exercising a subject alone (which is what most homework was in my school system at least) is a very good way of understanding it better. I of course remember not wanting to do homework many times, and I remember excessive or idiotic homework assignments, but overall homework seemed to be one of the major modes of learning for me.
Also, related to Gates, Page, Brin - I don't generally think that it's a good idea to look at a small number of very successful people and try to emulate some part of their life experience - you are, în general, very likely to fall for some kind of survivorship bias, or accidentally home in on a less important detail (for example, Gates was probably helped much more by his extremely wealthy and well-connected family than any particular aspect of his schooling).
On the other hand, there are many voices saying that one of the important purposes of the public education system is to engender conformity, which is very rarely conducive to a truly out of the ordinary life. Noam Chomsky would be one of the most credible, and he has often credited his own career to his non-standard early schooling.
I've got two kids, and so I can attest from limited anecdotal evidence, that it's completely unpredictable how each kid will relate to homework.
wikipedia said he went to a regular private school then went to Harvard which sounds pretty conventional. Yeah he didn't finish, but worry about that later.
Been there myself.
Most school systems have been developed to produce workers, not scholars and researchers.
Hence, rota memorization in prioritized.
Getting people to hate learning is not seen as a serious failure of the school system.
Also, students are never encouraged to question the information they receive or the decision around what is important to learn and what is not.
non scholae sed vitae discimus.
FWIW the UK Education Act actually enshrines this concept (parents are responsible for a child being educated), though this has been eroded considerably by Tory policy in the last decade or so. We did tell our primary school "don't expect homework from $child[0]" one year, they didn't complain. However we also wanted to do flexschooling and the head refused it, which I'm still smarting over and consider to have been a significant detriment.
That same primary school ditched regular style homework in favour of projects, which $child[1] wants to do, and we can decide easily to curtail the time used doing it if we want. It's a great way of doing homework IMO; very child-centric.
I'm sympathetic to unschooling, but I've also seen it go wrong. If you decide to unschool, don't be dogmatic about it. Feel free to be more or less unschooly if that seems to be needed. Don't get sucked into a community where unschooling "purity" is highly valued.
As someone who participated in many academic competitions as a child, the winners were consistently weighted 9:1 private:public.
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041
> https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041
That article doesn't seem relevant. 'Poverty impedes cognitive function' is entirely compatible with 'IQ is highly correlated with wealth and is also highly heritable', and with the claim that private school can't make a genius out of a kid who lacks an extremely high IQ.
edit: maybe I misunderstood, and you only were only pointing out that some potential-genius kids have that potential stifled by poverty. But that doesn't seem to be the original point of disagreement.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259207757_Comment_o...
On the first page, the breakdown is 23 kids from public schools, 7 kids from private schools, 4 kids listing some sort of math circle / whatever Arateem is, 5 kids listing universities (home schooled/taking uni courses? No idea). Possibly a few of the private school kids are on scholarship. The 7 kids go to 4 schools.
First of all, once you're 55, it's easy to say stuff like that, because you won't be tested anymore. And I think there is a good chunk of survivorship bias: "Hey, I made it without worrying about tests, so you can, too!" Although that is probably not true for a big chunk of the population, especially once we look at non CS people.
Then I think, he is fundamentally right. Grades shouldn't matter so much, it is about what you learn. And I like to approach things that way too, but in the end, I always have to study for the tests as well.
The problem is exactly how deeply it is ingrained in everything. If I just stop caring, it doesn't really help. I will just end up in a worse position, since everyone around me still cares about test results. The people that need to change their mind are the people that use tests as measures of qualities that they are not a good measure for. I think a lot of people are falling thought the cracks because they don't fit the expectation of a HR person close enough.
In the end, we will always have to have tests. A completely individualized assessment of peoples qualities or fit for certain roles just doesn't scale. It would be great though to come up with new ways of testing that are maybe more in line with actual learning. For example, it would be nice to have tests at university where I can google things, just like in the real world.
I am lucky enough to be able to work in the booming tech sector where there are so many jobs that it is fine if I don't work towards a test.
You can you use "test" as a proxy for the impression you want to make on your boss and peers. Maybe even friends and family.
It's up to you to redefine that test (or create a complementary one) based on your own goals and your own timeline.
One of the best professors I had at university for a Linux course always said: “If you don’t know something, google it!”
He backed up his words by allowing googling on the actual coding part of his exams. You had to understand the underlying concepts but you never had to memorize syntax. One time, he had us write a small program in C that involved threading during a proctored timed exam. Everyone ran out of time for that part.
His course and exams were _rigorous_. You could never cram for his class and expect to pass and indeed I know of one student repeatedly failing his course.
This was one of the courses in university where I gained the bulk of my useful knowledge and practical skills I use to this day. I can count the courses that were of similar quality I took at university on one(1) hand. The rest of my degree involved hackable tests, apathetic professors and were massive time-wasters. I learned nothing from them, obviously.
The good professors made me realize how bad the rest of my degree was and how much of a racket higher education could be.
I look back at my undergrad days and wonder how much more I would have learned if I had not focused so much on grades. I’m still actively trying to unschool myself.
When I studied law, all our exams were open book. Bring whatever you want. I brought casebooks and printouts of legislation and important cases. Others also brought headnotes and volumes of Halsbury's (a legal encyclopaedia).
None of this helped if you didn't know the material well enough to identify the legal issues in each question.
Which is why I failed Torts.
My machine learning professor who was from CMU would allow us to put anything we wanted on both sides of one piece of printer paper to bring to exams.
No amount of notes helped if you had no understanding of the algorithms and formulas.
I almost failed that course too, but it was also one of the cornerstones of my university career. It made me realize how much I had been optimizing for the wrong thing: grades instead of understanding.
To be fair he did say "For me, as for most students, the measurement of what I was learning completely dominated actual learning in college. I was fairly earnest; I was genuinely interested in most of the classes I took, and I worked hard. And yet I worked by far the hardest when I was studying for a test."
>I think a lot of people are falling thought the cracks because they don't fit the expectation of a HR person close enough.
In retrospect I'm sure this was the case for me. It's probably why I ended up starting my own business.
The question I have is how do you hack the system such that you help those who are struggling to survive?
> And at elite universities, that means nearly everyone, since someone who didn't care about getting good grades probably wouldn't be there in the first place. The result is that students compete to maximize the difference between learning and getting good grades.
> When I started advising startup founders at Y Combinator, especially young ones, I was puzzled by the way they always seemed to make things overcomplicated.
I suspect part of the problem (of early founders being focused on hacking tests) was related to how heavily YC funded people from elite universities—which select people who do exactly that.
I love reading his tweets! They're all so down to earth and illuminating. That said, I'm not a fan of his blog writing as much. I find it full of overly-sparse nuggets of wisdom. It needs to be more concise, to the point, with fewer clever metaphors. This article could've been compressed 70% and still have been human readable.
"Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
If you enjoy the essay form, I highly recommend the "Essays of E.B. White" (yes, the same White of The Elements of Style). Some of the essays stay with you for a long time.https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060932237/essays-of-e-b-wh...
As a physics student, I can say we definitely pulled 2am-ers 2 weeks into the semester. Our Condensed Matter professor gave us some of the most random questions that no one could anticipate. To be honest, I was one of those "diligent" students who got good grades. I'll tell you right now his quizzes were not hackable. The following held true:
He tested on the former, so we had no way of memorizing or hacking the quiz. You had to really understand the concepts to do well on his quizzes. Ditto for my grad Quantum Mechanics class.On the other hand, I've also had professors who give exams pulled from the internet and allow use of the internet while taking those exams. I hacked that immediately during the exam, then almost got in trouble for it.
> ...if the professor tells you that there were three underlying causes of the Schism of 13... you'd better know them.
A professor like my Condensed Matter Physics professor would go on and on about 3 fundamental causes and then quiz students about the 5 fundamental causes, giving a zero to anyone who couldn't think of all the base 3, then grading the remaining students who thought creatively of 2 additional causes against each other on a bell curve. :)
To me, this sounds like a plausible argument against such tests.
The issue of creatively grading responses to an ill-defined question often pops up in discussion here about interview practices. In those discussions, typically someone will say “I don’t do a generic whiteboard interview. Instead I do [idiosyncratic thing x]. It really gives me amazing insight into the candidate.”
Then someone else says “Yeah right, a weird test with unclear metrics just gives you a big empty space to fill in with all your biases and pick someone who answers the way you would”.
Of course, both sides are exaggerated here. But it’s not clear to me that “creative” tests are necessarily any better.
So people who are good at tests get ahead. We get that you're not interested in grades. We all know people who play the game and win, not sincerely engage with their job or education or whatever.
But I'd like to hear from pg / other people in YC how they think they are "hacked". What do their successful applicants actually optimise for when "delight" and even "growth" are just as subjective as "learning"? After all they fund lots and lots of companies and founders, many of whom make no returns. How do founders keep their funding "success" long past the point it was deserved?
So there's still a question what companies should do until they reach this growth possibility.
I've worked in tech for quite a while now. I used to buy into the meritocracy cant but as the years wore on, I realized how much bullshit it was.
I think the biggest moment came when I started to think about how to explain to people in my new home, South Africa, that working in tech would free you economically. There's some truth to that. But that's not the whole truth.
The truth is that all those years ago when I got my first coding job in financial services, I ticked 3 important boxes for the interview: white, male, and university-educated.
Besides that: The (classical) financial industry (banks and insurances) has a relatively trival IT (of copying data around and displaying it). Combined with external pressure, they are -today- leading on progressive indicators, such as diversity, inclusion, near-shoring and far-shoring.
Bingo! The real problem is the using incorrect metrics. If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its entire life thinking it is stupid!