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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 managemen

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".)
        tedunangst 16y ago
        Depends if they are paying you to prioritize. If they're paying you to do what you're told and you don't, that doesn't usually end well. If you're responsible for priorities, you just have to never screw up, that's all.
- 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.

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".)
      - tedunangst 16y ago
        Depends if they are paying you to prioritize. If they're paying you to do what you're told and you don't, that doesn't usually end well. If you're responsible for priorities, you just have to never screw up, that's all.
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.