I think his remarks need to be put in perspective. Compared to any other college lecturers, how do his lectures measure up? Sure, a couple dozen students who a

I think his remarks need to be put in perspective. Compared to any other college lecturers, how do his lectures measure up? Sure, a couple dozen students who attended out of hundreds perfectly understood everything in the lectures and demonstrated it in exams to Feynman's unreasonably high standards. Does that mean that all of the rest failed to gain any substantial physics knowledge which was valuable in their academic or professional careers? I think not. Looking at the wikipedia entry for the lectures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physic...), it says that Feynman taught "the course" once. It's clearly a beefy 3-course sequence that was taught over the span of 3 years. Sounds like it could have been 1 semester a year for each of the three courses in the physics intro sequence. How many students is that? Somewhere in the low hundreds, I guess. 5-10% of the students with "perfect" scores could be "two dozen". That's not unusual and not a failure if larger fractions got a good-enough grounding in physics at Caltech to proceed. I think they did. Feynman's remarks, I think, are an elliptical self-deprecating way of saying the lectures didn't meet his own standards. That doesn't mean they were "a failure".