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This reminds me of a professor I had on numerical methods. The guy was an absolute genius. He helped write some amount (a lot?) of the FORTRAN compiler for at

This reminds me of a professor I had on numerical methods. The guy was an absolute genius. He helped write some amount (a lot?) of the FORTRAN compiler for at least one of its variants. And... we used state of the art numerical methods. We had a textbook on numerical methods, sure, but this was always just a starting place for what we used. (To this day, I've got some numerical algorithms I coded in FORTRAN that can crush those from common libraries.) If you missed a lecture, there was no making it up by reading the book. You were SCREWED if you didn't get a really good copy of the notes. Another thing: When lecturing, he barely glanced at his notes even in the middle of complicated derivations of error bounds and things like that. But here's the real point of this discussion: He had a way of testing that produced similar results to what this article is talking about. We wouldn't be tested on a general survey of the methods we covered in the class. No. We would be tested on just one or maybe two of the methods we had learned over the entire semester, and the exam questions would be a DEEP, DEEP dive into that method. (I had this guy for 3 semesters, always the same.) When asked what the exam would be on, he'd basically just say: "The numerical methods we've covered thus far". So you had no idea which method you'd need to learn to the maximum degree of depth. This forced you to simply study the shit out of them all. I mean, you had to know some really subtle things about the method if you wanted to get a reasonable grade on the exam. I actually grew to appreciate this as a testing method. It was the first class I'd ever had where I actually really needed to study. And study I did. Every other class would involve at most a cursory review of a couple of example problems I thought I might run into. This class though was always a minimum of like 3 full days of complete and thorough review, in teams with the other students.

FredPret 4y ago
Loved your post, but as an aside, this stood out to me: >It was the first class I'd ever had where I actually really needed to study I wish we had a way of challenging every smart kid with proper material. When I got to university and suddenly had to try, it was quite a shock to my system. I could, in theory, have used the first 18 years of my life much more productively.
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  OMG, yes. The real tragedy there is that how to handle being challenged is a super important skill. And many of our best and brightest don't get to practice it all until it's too late. You can't learn a skill without practice. That's just not how it works. It makes no sense to me at all that children from all different backgrounds and abilities go through an identical curriculum at an identical rate. Like, have the people that set that up never met humans and human children before? My sister has the luxury of home-schooling her kids. And so they all have workbooks they can go through at their own individualized pace. As a result, one of them, my 6 year old nephew is now at about a 7th or 8th grade level in mathematics. He just loves doing math. Can you imagine how long that kid would have had to wait to actually be challenged in math if he went through the public school system? ...And they're actively trying to get rid of advanced study paths for such kids.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    We lost something in the path from homeschooling to one-room schoolhouse to the massive school factories we have today - which was pacing the students. Now we try to group everyone by age. It's much easier when there's only a small group of kids - but who's to say the massive schools shouldn't be close to large groups of one-room schoolhouses instead of the age-segregated blocks we have now? Done correctly this helps all kids, except those who just happen to be perfectly aligned with their age.
    - lazide 4y ago
      Individualization is hard to do at scale, and expensive.
      - FredPret 4y ago
        We need something like the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. I’m sure you can hire a couple of thousand professors and experts and map out a huge interactive curriculum tree. This can’t replace school - you still need socialization, disciple, adult supervision, sport, etc. But academically this would beat my high school experience six-love.
munificent 4y ago
I'm familiar with this testing strategy. It has one major upside: It allows an exam to test the material in great depth without being enormously long. But it also has one major downside: Students may not learn all of the material equally well. If the random point in the material space that the exam focuses on happens to be a point that the student didn't learn as well, the exam result will appear as if the student learned all of the material poorly. In other words, the exam has higher random variance.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  This happened to me in my computer graphics class. The first exam had a multi-part problem where the first part involved quaternions. I was familiar with quaternions from my time as a physics major, but did not remember the professor introducing them. I reviewed my notes afterwards and found that he did in fact mention them in passing in a lecture two weeks previous to the exam, but did not call particular attention to them nor did he assign any homework involving them.
shard 4y ago
Going the opposite way, here's a story of an electrical engineering class I had in college. The class subject was a slightly off-the-main-path course, taught by a visiting professor from overseas. It involved deep analysis of electrical circuits with some heavy math. At the final exam, the first thing I noticed was how thin the exam packet was. It was a harrowing experience when I opened the exam -- it consisted of exactly one question. As it turned out, it required using nearly everything we learned during the course to solve that one question, which I thought was a fascinating if scary way to test students, as forgetting one of the methods taught could block progress.

FredPret 4y ago

Loved your post, but as an aside, this stood out to me: >It was the first class I'd ever had where I actually really needed to study I wish we had a way of challenging every smart kid with proper material. When I got to university and suddenly had to try, it was quite a shock to my system. I could, in theory, have used the first 18 years of my life much more productively.

Enginerrrd 4y ago
OMG, yes. The real tragedy there is that how to handle being challenged is a super important skill. And many of our best and brightest don't get to practice it all until it's too late. You can't learn a skill without practice. That's just not how it works. It makes no sense to me at all that children from all different backgrounds and abilities go through an identical curriculum at an identical rate. Like, have the people that set that up never met humans and human children before? My sister has the luxury of home-schooling her kids. And so they all have workbooks they can go through at their own individualized pace. As a result, one of them, my 6 year old nephew is now at about a 7th or 8th grade level in mathematics. He just loves doing math. Can you imagine how long that kid would have had to wait to actually be challenged in math if he went through the public school system? ...And they're actively trying to get rid of advanced study paths for such kids.
- bombcar 4y ago
  We lost something in the path from homeschooling to one-room schoolhouse to the massive school factories we have today - which was pacing the students. Now we try to group everyone by age. It's much easier when there's only a small group of kids - but who's to say the massive schools shouldn't be close to large groups of one-room schoolhouses instead of the age-segregated blocks we have now? Done correctly this helps all kids, except those who just happen to be perfectly aligned with their age.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Individualization is hard to do at scale, and expensive.
    - FredPret 4y ago
      We need something like the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. I’m sure you can hire a couple of thousand professors and experts and map out a huge interactive curriculum tree. This can’t replace school - you still need socialization, disciple, adult supervision, sport, etc. But academically this would beat my high school experience six-love.

munificent 4y ago

I'm familiar with this testing strategy. It has one major upside: It allows an exam to test the material in great depth without being enormously long. But it also has one major downside: Students may not learn all of the material equally well. If the random point in the material space that the exam focuses on happens to be a point that the student didn't learn as well, the exam result will appear as if the student learned all of the material poorly. In other words, the exam has higher random variance.

aidenn0 4y ago
This happened to me in my computer graphics class. The first exam had a multi-part problem where the first part involved quaternions. I was familiar with quaternions from my time as a physics major, but did not remember the professor introducing them. I reviewed my notes afterwards and found that he did in fact mention them in passing in a lecture two weeks previous to the exam, but did not call particular attention to them nor did he assign any homework involving them.

shard 4y ago

Going the opposite way, here's a story of an electrical engineering class I had in college. The class subject was a slightly off-the-main-path course, taught by a visiting professor from overseas. It involved deep analysis of electrical circuits with some heavy math. At the final exam, the first thing I noticed was how thin the exam packet was. It was a harrowing experience when I opened the exam -- it consisted of exactly one question. As it turned out, it required using nearly everything we learned during the course to solve that one question, which I thought was a fascinating if scary way to test students, as forgetting one of the methods taught could block progress.