This advice is aimed at students who are already getting good-great grades but want to optimise further. Advice for students that get poor grades is quite different.

That being said my grades in university were middling to poor and once I got out I applied for jobs with my degree in hand and not a single one asked for my academic transcript. Perhaps more prestigious graduate positions might have, but I just didn’t apply for those. But I got various positions and my career took off just fine.

Now the idea that anyone would care about my university grades seems laughable. So, it’s important to remember that learning in university is important but if you don’t get amazing grades it’s not something people should stress about too much IMO.

This is fun to do during lectures but in my experience only about 5-10% of my learning happened in math class. The other 90% happened at home as I worked through the problem sets.

Essentially the lectures served as an inefficient way of delivering me a set of notes which I’d then reference during homework sessions. I could often predict what was coming next in the lecture but the really hard parts were the key parts in some technical lemmas that were necessary to complete the theorem. Learning how to figure out a key step like that had to come completely on my own (with no spoilers).

In a lot of ways, math lectures really started to turn into an experience similar to watching a Let’s Play of a favourite video game. Watching those can tell you exactly what you need to do to get past the part where you’re stuck but they don’t in general make you better at video games. For that you need to actually play them yourself.

Agree with this comment but follow up to this tip:

Only use this as a learning technique. Do not accidentally let this bleed over into personal 1:1 conversations.

I know some people in my life who are "smart" and they will cut people off in the middle of conversation to the effect of "oh yeah I already know what you are going to say, let me go ahead and cut you off so I can respond faster".

On top of being completely obnoxious on the face of it, they are wrong enough times in their predictions to where it completely fucks the conversation.

Well said. And it makes sense, if you define intelligence as the ability to successfully predict the future.

And how interesting that that is literally how LLMs are trained during pretraining. Like Ilya said: To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of a detective novel, you must have followed the plot, have world knowledge about physics, psychology, etc..

And that’s what you’re pointing at here. Testing yourself on the ability to predict during a lecture is like running a loss function to keep you on your toes.

This is a fantastic tip, thank you for sharing! It reminded me of an article similar to this one:

Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact (The minds of social species are strikingly resonant): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synch...

"... when people converse or share an experience, their brain waves synchronize. Neurons in corresponding locations of the different brains fire at the same time, creating matching patterns ..."

"The experience of “being on the same wavelength” as another person is real, and it is visible in the activity of the brain."

"Synchrony may be a sign of shared cognitive processing ..." "The mouse study suggested another level of meaning for synchrony: it predicts the outcomes of future interactions."

Which is why I hate the PowerPoint presentation-based lectures. Speaker typically goes too fast, and their brain does not actually break down the arguments into logical steps. They just read the slides.

Chalk and board is the way.

This is exactly how I read research papers and how I advocate others read them as well. As you read try to figure out how you would solve the problem outlined and what experiments you would need to perform.

Great advice! Personally, I got immense value from writing notes but never when I wrote them during the lecture. 30 minutes after the lecture has ended is a perfect time time to sit down in the library and write notes for what the lecture was about. This gives enough time to reflect about the big picture, but not so too much time that the details are lost.

I like this idea but I always struggled to keep up with note taking. And the teachers were struggling to get through all the material. There was a race on both sides! But that was many years ago. If I were doing it today, I'd take pictures with my phone, use a computer to transcribe it, and then I'd have enough time to do what you said.

There were times in university where I had figured out the material on my own (maybe even several lectures ahead), and the confirmation actually felt a bit disappointing.

This is good advice for the LSAT too, and baked into LSAT Demon's app. If you can predict an answer before looking at the choices, you're probably on the right track.

My technique was to write tons of notes during the lecture. In college, I would have many pages of notes for each lecture and because writing is more of an active process than just sitting or spacing out for an hour, I rarely had to study for an exam.

Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science. You either put in the effort to learn and struggle until you succeed or you don't. There is no secret sauce.

I've always studied with peers after classes (I'm a chemistry master) and it was the best way to learn. Discuss different ideas and approaches and understandings was a force multiplier.

> Having been tested for many years of my life (with pretty good results), here are some rules of thumb that I feel helped me

Oh, come now, I think Karpathy adequately qualifies his advice. :-)

> ... should be offered by universities.

Yes, but remember the onus is on the student to figure out how they learn best. Tertiary education is no longer about spoon-feeding (adult) students everything.

Since the parent mentioned a book, here is the reference, and also two related Wikipedia pages regarding how to learn effectively:

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn, Gordon and Breach, 1997. https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Art-Doing-Science-Engineering-Le...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system

Richard Hamming in his "You and Your Research" talk compares it to compound interest:

    What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.

I always overestimate how much I can do in one day and I underestimate how much I can get done in 100 days (with the caveat that I have to work on it consistently).

> I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities.

Agreed but i also think it should be focused on much earlier as well.

> One really important factor is the grading curve, if used.

I never use it to grade, because it is empirically unfair.

The further you move in the educational system, the less people's aptitute matches a Gaussian or "normal" distribution.

(I also often fought a lot with management and HR when I was a manager in industry, as my team was hardly statistically normal (100% Ph.D.s from top places) imposing a Gaussian for bonus payments on a strongly left-skewed distribution is unfair. Microsoft introduced this and got into legal trouble, and many companies followed late and didn't realize the legal trouble part.)

I don't think I'll ever understand/accept the idea of curving grades.

This posts sums up everything that's wrong with grading and modern colleges.

That won't work at elite schools like Stanford where a hard class average is like 98% and 94% will give you B+ due to the opposite curve being applied.

So another strategy to do well might include tempting your classmates to distraction or perhaps offering to "help" them but in fact feed them misinformation? Got it.

That has been said more than once - but research fails to back it up in general. You are not that different from others.

> I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this

I think back to my college years (2002-2006) and I don't recall being very receptive to explicit advice even if it was realistically applicable. Even given everything I know about myself now, I struggle to imagine how I could have persuaded my 20-year-old self to do anything with words alone.

In university, how can you get a 4.0 with an 85% average? In high school they added 1.0 to honors courses but I don’t remember the same thing happening in undergrad.

If the origin of that was a single study, you should learn about then replication crisis in psychology that called into question large swaths of results, after around 2/3rds of studies failed replication.

Occasional all-nighters can be fun. We even did them at work back in the dotcom days. I wouldn't do them now, because they don't really accomplish anything. But they can be fun.

This is an article about doing well in courses, not in making friends

Why do friends need to be made through all-nighters? Could you have made the same friends by organizing study groups during regular hours, and then doing something else fun with those people in the evenings?

> NEVER. EVER. EVER. Leave a test early.

It has been nearly 20 years, but my rule of thumb was that I wouldn't leave until I had done *three* review passes of the test. That is, quadruple checking, completing the exam and then reviewing my answers three times. That is pretty far into the diminishing returns for me catching my own errors.

That *almost* never happens, but there are exceptions -- sometimes they really do give way way more time than you need, especially if you are already strong at the material in question.

With that said, the key point is that the time tradeoff here for leaving early is terrible in typical college classes that have heavy weight on exams. Especially the first 10 -20 minutes of double checking is very likely worth 5+ hours of homework time or study time in terms of points towards the grade.

> Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.

I think the trade-off of being a little jittery and possibly scoring better on an exam is probably worth it. Unless you turn it into a habit, a few hours short on sleep a month isn't going to measurably harm you. Then again, it depends on how much you stand to gain from studying those extra few hours - and it's equally important to be realistic on that quantity.

I left a test early once and my TA made it a point to tear my answers apart.

Paraphrasing a saying that is popular among coaches:

Everyone has the desire to win but very few have the will to prepare to win.

Doing well in school is overwhelmingly about simply having the will to do the work. To read, listen, take notes, study, practice, and review. There's no magic.

Not sure about 2013 but in 2016 he taught this gem of a class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfnWJUyUJYU&list=PLkt2uSq6rB...

I never did that in college because it seemed awfully manipulative to bother them unless I really needed it. It didn't even occur to me that that's what other people had been doing until I had almost graduated.

Being a student to me just really warps your perspective on the world because it confines you into such an arbitrary, stressful, gameable system that you either adapt to it and come out of it with a very flawed model of reality, reject it at your own peril, or suffer through it. I would rather get a B than transparently work my professor for an A- and it's concerning to think that the people who go on to become doctors and management consultants are disproportionately the ones who do that.

> sociopath career

If someone's seems obviously a sociopath from a single innocuous interaction, they're probably not a real sociopath. I'm not sure what the litmus test is for a "made-up" question vs. a genuine question based on the course material; the only difference is whether the student already knows the answer.

I think we're a bit too eager to throw around "sociopath." When I nod along to my boss' vacation story and ask him follow-up questions, I guess that also makes me a sociopath, because he's not a good storyteller and I'm not interested in Machu Picchu (this is a made up anecdote for illustrative purposes).

Were you a professor you might also be a bit more sympathetic to the pressure academia puts on students to make them suck up like this.

> Half of the students are already drugged to the gills.

He did advocate ample sleep and not pulling all-nighters, near the top of the article.

The problems were more obvious to me when I was older and trying to mentor college students.

Some of them just got it, absorbed good advice like a sponge, rejected bad advice, and did their best. They were unsurprisingly successful in life (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary)

The most frustrating cases were the students who got baited by angry internet advice. Reddit was a frequent source of bad advice. Some got pulled into 4Chan or Something Awful (depending on the era). Others were in weird IRC channels or Discords. All of them got poisoned by cynical online junk. I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway.

The hardest type for me to mentor were the students who had a bottomless bucket of excuses to pull from for everything in their life. Nothing was ever their fault, even if their failure was unambiguously traceable back to their lack of studying. It was always the fault of their professor, their roommate, their parents, their students, their friends, or even their mentors (me) because they had trained themselves to find someone or something to blame in every situation. Not surprisingly they were always failing to progress in life until they hit some situation that forced self-reflection and learning. Some of them managed to turn it around, but I can still find many of them angrily ranting into LinkedIn or other social media to this day.

Mentoring was hard. It was rewarding to work with the students who wanted to learn and knew how to prefer good advice over bad. For some it felt like most of the battle was just keeping them away from bad influences and resisting the urge to run to Reddit to find something that helped them believe nothing was their fault.

For two years I wrote notes in class on yellow legal pad. After class, I rewrote into a spiral notebook, one for each class. That way I only carried a legal pad to each class everyday.

Not surprisingly, my grades those two years were great. Never had the fortitude to keep it up.

> 1. Follow actively the lessons.

It sounds obvious, but I wonder if this works for everyone. I've always had a very hard time to follow lessons (I studied maths then CS), but did work hard on the side and ultimately did quite well at tests and national exams.

I think the lecture format didn't work well for me, and I would have been better off with the just material, and access to a professor for questions.

They told us which chapters to read before each lecture, nobody else that I knew did it. I did. It was super helpful.

Yeah, it's like most people know exercise is good for body. But good luck my rational mind getting me to the gym on most days

That said I do think even the seemingly obvious need to be repeated often because the audience keeps changing. So it is _new_ for someone, it may change someone's perspective

Yep, and they are often scaled by the "Normal Curve". The catch with this flawed reasoning is that a Normal Distribution requires multiple independent imputs where none is deterministic. Having a professor and a curriculum are together goes against that proposition. There needs to be a better distribution to measure varation within an effective teaching method. Teaching towards a normal distributon result favors giving tests with flawed grading and other bad practices. In the late 1980s I didn't want to pursue a PHD due to the bleak future of acedemia, but if I had this would have been a major focus as it is causing a myriad of problems in our society abusing higher eduction students in this way.

The second half of this explains why he suggests gaming it, and seems to boil down to Grant Allen's maxim of "Don't let your schooling interfere with your education"

My tests were always tricky variations on a problem, or the exact problem, which they completely solved in the TA sessions.

I couldn’t figure out why I got the first B’s and C’s of my life until I realized that.

Is guru being used in some special sense here? Cuz Karpathy has been an AI luminary for at least 10 years. This post for instance taught RL to a whole generation https://karpathy.github.io/2016/05/31/rl/.

DarkReader plugin has settings to manipulate fonts on pages, it's quite easy to configure.

Assuming you are already using dark reader to give dark mode to all pages.

I use reader mode when typography sucks.