7 ms·

Schools such as Caltech and MIT have rigorous curricula that proverbially requires constant study every day of the week just to stay in the middle of the pack.

Schools such as Caltech and MIT have rigorous curricula that proverbially requires constant study every day of the week just to stay in the middle of the pack. Naturally, most students cut back on sleep. Proponents of this approach are aware of this, even boast about it, saying that this is the best way to learn the material. On the other hand, numerous studies -- including the link at the top of this page -- conclude that this is the worst way to get anything done. They can't both be right.

kscaldef 16y ago
No, those schools have cultures that promote such behavior. I was a grad student and TA at Caltech and observed that the undergrads had horrible time management skills. Procrastination and heroic effort at the last minute were the norm. (I'm not specifically picking on Caltech undergrads, BTW. I'm fairly sure this is typical at most schools.)
- Alex3917 16y ago
  "Procrastination and heroic effort at the last minute were the norm." This may be true, but there are also plenty of students who work from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to bed and still don't have enough time to get all of their assignments done. The problem is that functionally there isn't really any difference between having a 3.5 GPA and a 2.0 GPA, so at some point most people figure out that what they're being asked to do is impossible so they might as well just do their own thing.
  - dkarl 16y ago
    Perhaps they should have gone somewhere else where they had time to sleep and think instead of just studying all the time. I know that where I work, the folks who are willing to grind the hardest on assigned work are rarely the ones you turn to for difficult and responsible work. The very best people are the ones who work extremely hard at self-directed work and sometimes push back against assigned work, but they are very, very rare, much rarer than people who are willing to grind day and night on whatever you assign them. The best person for difficult assignments is usually someone who refuses to overwork himself or herself.
    - makmanalp 16y ago
      I can't agree with this more. However, whenever I refuse to do work I get stamped on the forehead with "lazy". For example, I figure out that the homework in a class is 25% the grade but there are 25 of them, so each is worth 1%. I understand the topic so I figure that it's a waste of my 4 hours to do the work for 1% extra. Bam, "you're so lazy".
      - alextgordon 16y ago
        Just think: Completing a pointless assignment will, by definition, provide zero benefit to anybody. Watching TV also provides little benefit. Hence, completing that assignment is at least as lazy as watching TV. [Actually watching TV does provide a benefit: it's relaxing. The same is not true for assignments.]
        deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - tedunangst 16y ago
        Where does this lazy stamp actually land? Surely your school doesn't actually put a little (* lazy) on your transcript? You seem to know you're not lazy and there's no way the lazy stamp is actually going to be transmitted to anybody who cares, so why do you care?
        makmanalp 16y ago
        Good point. I'm not too worried. I'm rather curious as to if I start prioritizing important things that need to be done vs things that can be postponed at work, am I going to suffer? I'm guessing the answer is yes.
        jleader 16y ago
        Depends whose opinion on importance you're using for prioritization. If you postpone things that aren't important to you, but are important to your boss, that's not going to go well. If you postpone things your boss doesn't care about, in order to do a better/quicker job on something the boss considers important, that'll probably make your boss happy. (Note, I'm using "boss" as short-hand for "your boss, and all the other interested parties, customers, etc. who can affect your boss's opinion of you".)
  - melissamiranda 16y ago
    Personally I found Dartmouth GPAs correlated to how often you went to class and how much attention you paid to the lecture. If you didn't go or zoned out, you'd be working all day and all night just to catch up on that 1 hour you missed.
- cj 16y ago
  If you want to have a life outside of school (job, side projects, social life) it's very hard to stay ahead of work without losing sleep even with excellent time management. Certain classes are worse than others and it doesn't usually depend on the content of the course, but the people teaching it. I'd blame the culture of the faculty above the school, although the school likely influences said culture.
  - kscaldef 16y ago
    Very few Caltech students have jobs. The faculty contributed from what I could see, but primarily in indulging procrastination by students. It was quite common for students to hand in the majority of a terms problem sets in the last week, and the professors would accept them even if there was a stated class policy that late assignments would not receive credit. (Of course, I acknowledge that this was particularly onerous to me, because I would be the one who then had to grade a full term worth of assignments in a week.)
    - jleader 16y ago
      From my experience as a Caltech undergrad, there was a "tragedy of the commons" in some of the larger classes. A student had a choice of doing the work early entirely on their own, or waiting until their classmates had started working on it, and being able to exchange advice, compare approaches, or verify answers with those classmates. Thus there was a fairly strong dis-incentive to always being the first to dig deeply into an assignment, unless you were so much smarter than your classmates that their cooperation was useless to you.
- dexen 16y ago
  Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/pub/JoS07-procrastinate.pdf http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/pub/JoS07-procrastinate.pdf ``We are writing this sentence two days before the deadline. Unfortunately that sentence (and this one) are among the ﬁrst that we have written. How could we have delayed so much when we have known about this deadline for months? (...)''
  - jpr 16y ago
    That looks like an interesting paper. I'll save it so I can read it later.
    - dexen 16y ago
      It's ``ha ha only serious'', actually. Whimsical style and solid analysis of algorithms you can actually use to schedule your procrastination & work better.
crystalis 16y ago
They might be drowning pigs to find the swimmers.
- capstone 16y ago
  Or, drowning swimmers to find dopers (provigil etc).
  - forensic 16y ago
    This is the future, there can be no doubt. The rewards of performance enhancing drugs in intellectual pursuits are tremendous. Even primitive performance enhancing drugs like methamphetamine and cocaine have fuelled some of the greatest minds in history. </socially undesirable fact of the day>
mjfern 16y ago
Even more disconcerting is the sleeping culture/routine throughout medical residency and fellowship; arguably, the most important stages of medical education, where doctors in training learn the hands-on skills to practice medicine. Despite the importance of learning during this stage, individuals are routinely sleep-deprived: "20% of all residents reported sleeping an average of 5 hours or less per night, with 66% averaging 6 hours or less per night. Residents averaging 5 or fewer hours of sleep per night were more likely to report serious accidents or injuries, conflict with other professional staff, use of alcohol, use of medications to stay awake, noticeable weight change, working in an "impaired condition," and having made significant medical errors." - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15124713 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15124713 A Wikipedia article focused on medical resident work hours: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours
- kylek 16y ago
  One thing that I wanted to try (but never had the schedule to support) is polyphasic sleep (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep). The idea that sleeping 15 minutes every 4 hours (on a very strict schedule) to keep your mind close to a waking-REM-type sleep. Granted, every few weeks you would have to crash HARD (20+ hour rest).
  - Jcasc 16y ago
    I also considered experimenting with this in college. I never ended up doing it, though.
    - ramchip 16y ago
      I'm... not sure what the point of such a comment can be. It's interesting in unintended ways.
  - rick888 16y ago
    The problem with this is that everyone is on the regular sleep 8 hours per-night schedule and you wouldn't be able to do this if you were working a regular job.
econner 16y ago
I think there is a kind of availability heuristic effect going on here. You hear about people who regularly pull all-nighters because they do boast about them so that it seems more prevalent than is actually the case. You don't hear the student bragging about how he got enough sleep last night and got all of his work done ahead of time. I'm an undergrad at Stanford and I think that if you plan ahead well enough it isn't difficult to get enough sleep and get all your work done. It's not only about managing time during the term, but also about managing which classes you take together term-to-term. There is also something to be said for developing endurance. Eventually you're going to have to do something you don't want to do while incredibly tired.. so pulling all-nighters is a kind of training for that.
endtime 16y ago
I excelled when I was a MS CS student at Stanford (I can go into detail if anyone needs convincing), and I did it on very little sleep - 4-5 hours/night for weeks at a time. I absolutely positively couldn't have done what I did on 8 hours of sleep a night. There wouldn't have been enough time in the day. I sleep much more now. Left to my own devices, I adjust to a roughly 28-hour clock during which I sleep 9-10 hours a cycle.
bonsaitree 16y ago
It's not about education or productivity. Top colleges, military training, and most early stage start-up environments all have either explicit or implicit cultures where part of the values indoctrination is to "achieve under fatigue". It isn't about what's optimal for long-term productivity or health. It's about gauging mental toughness and weeding out those individuals without an adequate level of committment to that particular community's values. If the individual can perform adequately under an extreme depravity of conditions, then they can be expected to excel, or at the very least, fall back to an acceptable baseline of trained performance when provided the surfeit of resources available under day-to-day tasking.
nostrademons 16y ago
I wonder if any studies have been done on the relationship between sleep and deliberate practice. I find that I need a pretty consistent 8 hours of sleep a night for normal operation. However, I've found that when I'm doing something challenging (say, a startup or a new project at work, or learning a new programming framework), this spikes upwards fast. I need about 9.5 hours when doing something moderately challenging, and up to 11 hours if it's a problem that requires my absolute full attention. I remember reading somewhere a hypothesis that sleep exists so that your mind can convert short term working memory into long-term memory. Naturally, you would need more of this if your short-term working memory is more filled up with complicated stuff. But this goes at odds with the cultural practices at Caltech or MIT or med school - if it's true, you should structure the curriculum so that students work very hard during the day, but then have enough time to go home and sleep it off before learning the next day's lesson. I wonder if there's any research on this. I find I also dream very vividly when working on a hard problem, but this could just be correlation, as REM cycles increase in frequency toward the end of the night, and if the night is extended, there ought to be more of them.
- pdx 16y ago
  I was also thinking of that hypothesis as I read this. It rings very true to me. I believe that people who have trouble sleeping are often people who didn't learn that much that day, and conversely, people who learn on a given day seem to need more sleep. I noticed this with my kids. A few months before they started learning to talk, say, at about 13 months, they seemed to need more sleep, even though they weren't exercising any more. This is the period that you can really begin to see them starting to "get it", about a lot of things in their world. Even though they aren't talking yet, they are beginning to understand what you are saying, so they are learning fast.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >A few months before they started learning to talk, say, at about 13 months, they seemed to need more sleep, even though they weren't exercising any more. 13 months has to be within a month or so of the median age for starting to walk (in my country at least, I know some start much younger) but you say your kids didn't increase their exercise; presumably then they were already walking at that age? We have 2 boys that have been treated almost identically, obviously there have been differences and only one of them is a first child. However they have so far had vastly different sleep patterns. The one who sleeps least appears to have developed fastest in linguistic terms. His brother, the slower, was certainly no slouch (and without wishing to boast) is pretty close to top of his class for reading despite being one of the youngest. I meet quite a lot of different parents & babies/toddlers from different backgrounds and find there are a lot of variations in sleep pattern - I don't have anywhere near enough contact with them to establish correlations with development and sleep pattern though. My kids could be outliers. I'm sure such studies must have been done?! tl;dr anecdotes are anecdotal and my experience doesn't bear out your hypothesis
peter_l_downs 16y ago
As a highschool student, I can tell you that the problem isn't limited to just the top universities; most of my friends and I get around 6 hours of sleep a night, and it's definitely not enough. Some nights I've gotten as little as 2 or 3 hours, but I disagree that this is the best way to learn material, because I don't remember a) any of the material I was studying or b) anything I may have learned in class the next day.
- SageRaven 16y ago
  Teenagers are a special subset of the sleep problem. In recent years, there have been studies that suggest teens tend to naturally stay up late, which clashes with the hours of compulsory education. Some districts have altered hours for these students, where classes start later in the morning, and the results have supposedly been very positive with respect to both grades and student retention.
  - peter_l_downs 16y ago
    Unfortunately, not yet at my school :(
semerda 16y ago
What Caltech/MIT are encouraging is repetition with continued study. Repetition cements short term memory into long term, ref "Brain Rules" book. In order for this process to work efficiently, good sleep is required. Hence how the 2 are related. What we humans fail to see is that running out of hours in a day to study (work et al) should not equal to cutting back on sleep. Cutting back on sleep is a quick & dirty approach but has its negatives which the article pointed out. If only we could see our consequences of these actions using some monitoring tool/data I'm certain many folks would be in a better position to balance/optimize their study and sleep patterns. So, both the article and these schools can be right ;-)
c0nsilience 16y ago
No, they can't both be right, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're at odds with each other, either. Perhaps some of those students might benefit or feel a hell of a lot better if they did get some sleep. I knew plenty of kids from Caltech and Harvey Mudd who did very well in school and didn't sacrifice sleep every night. Also, I'm not sure "proverbially" applies to the requirement of constant study in this case.
jakegottlieb 16y ago
There is no way they both are and I believe sleep is needed. The problem with learning late at night is that it takes longer; you may be sacrificing any sort of social life getting the right amount of sleep and rigorously studying. I guess there is always that sacrifice.

kscaldef 16y ago

No, those schools have cultures that promote such behavior. I was a grad student and TA at Caltech and observed that the undergrads had horrible time management skills. Procrastination and heroic effort at the last minute were the norm. (I'm not specifically picking on Caltech undergrads, BTW. I'm fairly sure this is typical at most schools.)

Alex3917 16y ago
"Procrastination and heroic effort at the last minute were the norm." This may be true, but there are also plenty of students who work from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to bed and still don't have enough time to get all of their assignments done. The problem is that functionally there isn't really any difference between having a 3.5 GPA and a 2.0 GPA, so at some point most people figure out that what they're being asked to do is impossible so they might as well just do their own thing.
- dkarl 16y ago
  Perhaps they should have gone somewhere else where they had time to sleep and think instead of just studying all the time. I know that where I work, the folks who are willing to grind the hardest on assigned work are rarely the ones you turn to for difficult and responsible work. The very best people are the ones who work extremely hard at self-directed work and sometimes push back against assigned work, but they are very, very rare, much rarer than people who are willing to grind day and night on whatever you assign them. The best person for difficult assignments is usually someone who refuses to overwork himself or herself.
  - makmanalp 16y ago
    I can't agree with this more. However, whenever I refuse to do work I get stamped on the forehead with "lazy". For example, I figure out that the homework in a class is 25% the grade but there are 25 of them, so each is worth 1%. I understand the topic so I figure that it's a waste of my 4 hours to do the work for 1% extra. Bam, "you're so lazy".
    - alextgordon 16y ago
      Just think: Completing a pointless assignment will, by definition, provide zero benefit to anybody. Watching TV also provides little benefit. Hence, completing that assignment is at least as lazy as watching TV. [Actually watching TV does provide a benefit: it's relaxing. The same is not true for assignments.]
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
    - tedunangst 16y ago
      Where does this lazy stamp actually land? Surely your school doesn't actually put a little (* lazy) on your transcript? You seem to know you're not lazy and there's no way the lazy stamp is actually going to be transmitted to anybody who cares, so why do you care?
      - makmanalp 16y ago
        Good point. I'm not too worried. I'm rather curious as to if I start prioritizing important things that need to be done vs things that can be postponed at work, am I going to suffer? I'm guessing the answer is yes.
        jleader 16y ago
        Depends whose opinion on importance you're using for prioritization. If you postpone things that aren't important to you, but are important to your boss, that's not going to go well. If you postpone things your boss doesn't care about, in order to do a better/quicker job on something the boss considers important, that'll probably make your boss happy. (Note, I'm using "boss" as short-hand for "your boss, and all the other interested parties, customers, etc. who can affect your boss's opinion of you".)
- melissamiranda 16y ago
  Personally I found Dartmouth GPAs correlated to how often you went to class and how much attention you paid to the lecture. If you didn't go or zoned out, you'd be working all day and all night just to catch up on that 1 hour you missed.
cj 16y ago
If you want to have a life outside of school (job, side projects, social life) it's very hard to stay ahead of work without losing sleep even with excellent time management. Certain classes are worse than others and it doesn't usually depend on the content of the course, but the people teaching it. I'd blame the culture of the faculty above the school, although the school likely influences said culture.
- kscaldef 16y ago
  Very few Caltech students have jobs. The faculty contributed from what I could see, but primarily in indulging procrastination by students. It was quite common for students to hand in the majority of a terms problem sets in the last week, and the professors would accept them even if there was a stated class policy that late assignments would not receive credit. (Of course, I acknowledge that this was particularly onerous to me, because I would be the one who then had to grade a full term worth of assignments in a week.)
  - jleader 16y ago
    From my experience as a Caltech undergrad, there was a "tragedy of the commons" in some of the larger classes. A student had a choice of doing the work early entirely on their own, or waiting until their classmates had started working on it, and being able to exchange advice, compare approaches, or verify answers with those classmates. Thus there was a fairly strong dis-incentive to always being the first to dig deeply into an assignment, unless you were so much smarter than your classmates that their cooperation was useless to you.
dexen 16y ago
Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/pub/JoS07-procrastinate.pdf http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/pub/JoS07-procrastinate.pdf ``We are writing this sentence two days before the deadline. Unfortunately that sentence (and this one) are among the ﬁrst that we have written. How could we have delayed so much when we have known about this deadline for months? (...)''
- jpr 16y ago
  That looks like an interesting paper. I'll save it so I can read it later.
  - dexen 16y ago
    It's ``ha ha only serious'', actually. Whimsical style and solid analysis of algorithms you can actually use to schedule your procrastination & work better.

crystalis 16y ago

They might be drowning pigs to find the swimmers.

capstone 16y ago
Or, drowning swimmers to find dopers (provigil etc).
- forensic 16y ago
  This is the future, there can be no doubt. The rewards of performance enhancing drugs in intellectual pursuits are tremendous. Even primitive performance enhancing drugs like methamphetamine and cocaine have fuelled some of the greatest minds in history. </socially undesirable fact of the day>

mjfern 16y ago

Even more disconcerting is the sleeping culture/routine throughout medical residency and fellowship; arguably, the most important stages of medical education, where doctors in training learn the hands-on skills to practice medicine. Despite the importance of learning during this stage, individuals are routinely sleep-deprived: "20% of all residents reported sleeping an average of 5 hours or less per night, with 66% averaging 6 hours or less per night. Residents averaging 5 or fewer hours of sleep per night were more likely to report serious accidents or injuries, conflict with other professional staff, use of alcohol, use of medications to stay awake, noticeable weight change, working in an "impaired condition," and having made significant medical errors." - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15124713 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15124713 A Wikipedia article focused on medical resident work hours: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours

kylek 16y ago
One thing that I wanted to try (but never had the schedule to support) is polyphasic sleep (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep). The idea that sleeping 15 minutes every 4 hours (on a very strict schedule) to keep your mind close to a waking-REM-type sleep. Granted, every few weeks you would have to crash HARD (20+ hour rest).
- Jcasc 16y ago
  I also considered experimenting with this in college. I never ended up doing it, though.
  - ramchip 16y ago
    I'm... not sure what the point of such a comment can be. It's interesting in unintended ways.
- rick888 16y ago
  The problem with this is that everyone is on the regular sleep 8 hours per-night schedule and you wouldn't be able to do this if you were working a regular job.

econner 16y ago

I think there is a kind of availability heuristic effect going on here. You hear about people who regularly pull all-nighters because they do boast about them so that it seems more prevalent than is actually the case. You don't hear the student bragging about how he got enough sleep last night and got all of his work done ahead of time. I'm an undergrad at Stanford and I think that if you plan ahead well enough it isn't difficult to get enough sleep and get all your work done. It's not only about managing time during the term, but also about managing which classes you take together term-to-term. There is also something to be said for developing endurance. Eventually you're going to have to do something you don't want to do while incredibly tired.. so pulling all-nighters is a kind of training for that.

endtime 16y ago

I excelled when I was a MS CS student at Stanford (I can go into detail if anyone needs convincing), and I did it on very little sleep - 4-5 hours/night for weeks at a time. I absolutely positively couldn't have done what I did on 8 hours of sleep a night. There wouldn't have been enough time in the day. I sleep much more now. Left to my own devices, I adjust to a roughly 28-hour clock during which I sleep 9-10 hours a cycle.

bonsaitree 16y ago

It's not about education or productivity. Top colleges, military training, and most early stage start-up environments all have either explicit or implicit cultures where part of the values indoctrination is to "achieve under fatigue". It isn't about what's optimal for long-term productivity or health. It's about gauging mental toughness and weeding out those individuals without an adequate level of committment to that particular community's values. If the individual can perform adequately under an extreme depravity of conditions, then they can be expected to excel, or at the very least, fall back to an acceptable baseline of trained performance when provided the surfeit of resources available under day-to-day tasking.

nostrademons 16y ago

I wonder if any studies have been done on the relationship between sleep and deliberate practice. I find that I need a pretty consistent 8 hours of sleep a night for normal operation. However, I've found that when I'm doing something challenging (say, a startup or a new project at work, or learning a new programming framework), this spikes upwards fast. I need about 9.5 hours when doing something moderately challenging, and up to 11 hours if it's a problem that requires my absolute full attention. I remember reading somewhere a hypothesis that sleep exists so that your mind can convert short term working memory into long-term memory. Naturally, you would need more of this if your short-term working memory is more filled up with complicated stuff. But this goes at odds with the cultural practices at Caltech or MIT or med school - if it's true, you should structure the curriculum so that students work very hard during the day, but then have enough time to go home and sleep it off before learning the next day's lesson. I wonder if there's any research on this. I find I also dream very vividly when working on a hard problem, but this could just be correlation, as REM cycles increase in frequency toward the end of the night, and if the night is extended, there ought to be more of them.

pdx 16y ago
I was also thinking of that hypothesis as I read this. It rings very true to me. I believe that people who have trouble sleeping are often people who didn't learn that much that day, and conversely, people who learn on a given day seem to need more sleep. I noticed this with my kids. A few months before they started learning to talk, say, at about 13 months, they seemed to need more sleep, even though they weren't exercising any more. This is the period that you can really begin to see them starting to "get it", about a lot of things in their world. Even though they aren't talking yet, they are beginning to understand what you are saying, so they are learning fast.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >A few months before they started learning to talk, say, at about 13 months, they seemed to need more sleep, even though they weren't exercising any more. 13 months has to be within a month or so of the median age for starting to walk (in my country at least, I know some start much younger) but you say your kids didn't increase their exercise; presumably then they were already walking at that age? We have 2 boys that have been treated almost identically, obviously there have been differences and only one of them is a first child. However they have so far had vastly different sleep patterns. The one who sleeps least appears to have developed fastest in linguistic terms. His brother, the slower, was certainly no slouch (and without wishing to boast) is pretty close to top of his class for reading despite being one of the youngest. I meet quite a lot of different parents & babies/toddlers from different backgrounds and find there are a lot of variations in sleep pattern - I don't have anywhere near enough contact with them to establish correlations with development and sleep pattern though. My kids could be outliers. I'm sure such studies must have been done?! tl;dr anecdotes are anecdotal and my experience doesn't bear out your hypothesis

peter_l_downs 16y ago

As a highschool student, I can tell you that the problem isn't limited to just the top universities; most of my friends and I get around 6 hours of sleep a night, and it's definitely not enough. Some nights I've gotten as little as 2 or 3 hours, but I disagree that this is the best way to learn material, because I don't remember a) any of the material I was studying or b) anything I may have learned in class the next day.

SageRaven 16y ago
Teenagers are a special subset of the sleep problem. In recent years, there have been studies that suggest teens tend to naturally stay up late, which clashes with the hours of compulsory education. Some districts have altered hours for these students, where classes start later in the morning, and the results have supposedly been very positive with respect to both grades and student retention.
- peter_l_downs 16y ago
  Unfortunately, not yet at my school :(

semerda 16y ago

What Caltech/MIT are encouraging is repetition with continued study. Repetition cements short term memory into long term, ref "Brain Rules" book. In order for this process to work efficiently, good sleep is required. Hence how the 2 are related. What we humans fail to see is that running out of hours in a day to study (work et al) should not equal to cutting back on sleep. Cutting back on sleep is a quick & dirty approach but has its negatives which the article pointed out. If only we could see our consequences of these actions using some monitoring tool/data I'm certain many folks would be in a better position to balance/optimize their study and sleep patterns. So, both the article and these schools can be right ;-)

c0nsilience 16y ago

No, they can't both be right, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're at odds with each other, either. Perhaps some of those students might benefit or feel a hell of a lot better if they did get some sleep. I knew plenty of kids from Caltech and Harvey Mudd who did very well in school and didn't sacrifice sleep every night. Also, I'm not sure "proverbially" applies to the requirement of constant study in this case.

jakegottlieb 16y ago

There is no way they both are and I believe sleep is needed. The problem with learning late at night is that it takes longer; you may be sacrificing any sort of social life getting the right amount of sleep and rigorously studying. I guess there is always that sacrifice.