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Very few Caltech students have jobs. The faculty contributed from what I could see, but primarily in indulging procrastination by students. It was quite commo

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.