[Sambdala]

I remember high school.

During class I hid whatever book I actually wanted to read at the time inside the class book and drowned out the teacher.

If homework was worth >10% of the total grade for the class (so that you couldn't get an A from tests/quizzes alone), I would copy the homework from someone else the period before.

Tests & quizzes are so gameable it's a complete joke. Standardized tests even more so. Without any actual learning from the class itself, you can generally come close to ace'ing most high school tests by being moderately intelligent.

There was one class where I got busted for copying the homework and actually had to apply myself for the rest of the semester to avoid being failed, and this was only because the teacher felt I could rise to my potential if challenged to do so. Thankfully, that was actually one of the more interesting classes I had to attend.

I was warned constantly that college was going to tear me apart if I didn't instill good study habits, but it was mostly more of the same. It actually required even less work because most classes relied more heavily on quiz & test scores than High School did. After my freshman year, I went to class about 2 hours a week (out of ~18) and still kept above a 3.5 GPA.

At the two corporate jobs I've held so far, the same formula still seems to apply where you can avoid applying yourself 98% of the time as long as you can shine during the corporate equivalent of "tests."

To date, it's the hardest thing in the world for me to garner the self control to apply myself to a task if I'm not passionate about it (even forcing myself to pay bills is a challenge), and I think a large part of that is due to the fact that I've been able to coast through every "challenge" quite easily, and everything has seemed to work itself out so far.

This next month I'm actually striking out on my own, thankfully on something I'm passionate about (and have been working on for the past six months on the side), and I'm scared to death I won't be able to actually follow through on the hard work required to be successful as an entrepreneur.

[ska]

One thing that's missing here is that college really is a "you get out what you get in" situation. As a prof, you see people like this all the time, and hopefully you take the time to try and engage them more, but at the end of the day it isn't your responsibility if they choose to waste the opportunity. The "challenge" in college isn't to make a 4.0 GPA, it's to push yourself to find your own boundaries. Many profs will bend over backwards to help a student who is doing this, and (unlike high school) you can scale up your program to meet and exceed any persons abilities.

Sure, maybe you can skate by and manage a decent GPA, but you aren't doing yourself any favors, your basically telling us that you half assed four years of personal development, and you should know that it is probably obvious to those you've worked with and for. The corporate world has its share of people too, skating just like they were. Typically they are the ones not being considered for rapid advancement and grooming for bigger things.

Of course, you may just be exceptional. And it's not like you can't recover from this with hard work. But consider this as you head out on your own: Sometimes you just get lucky, but it's more likely that you will succeed or fail now largely on the back of hard work (and here's the tricky part) applied to the right places. Consider an alternative universe "you" who grabbed hold of college with both hands and squeezed until it gave up as much useful stuff as it could....

That guy would be eating your lunch right now. Not because of the college, per se, but because of the attitude and experience.

[finder83]

I agree in principle...but in practice I think college is much less of an opportunity to make it what you want it to be than you make it out to be. Perhaps at a graduate level or at a top level school you can learn more if you apply yourself more, but at a regular state school, it was really just an extension of high school. I left with the opinion that liberal arts is just a repeat of everything you were supposed to learn during middle and high school with longer papers and more reading, but really just the same content. The only students who had trouble either 1.) Didn't actually pay attention in middle or high school or 2.) Couldn't read or work fast enough to keep up. The major classes were really pretty easy as well as a computer science major, but that's because I was already a programmer...I suppose that's not the norm. At least towards the end, I put a lot of work into it and read pretty much every page, but didn't get a lot out of it.

Many of the same problems plague colleges that plague high schools though...professors that either don't care or aren't very good at teaching, students that are just there for the degree, books that don't really challenge, and papers that just require following the formula "5 paragraphs, 3 summary sentences". Very little learning took place for me in any of that. The learning I did was from outside of college and was from learning what is considered generally graduate school work for C.S.

I really hope that most people's experiences aren't that way, and that colleges do teach young people. It just wasn't my experience through 3 different colleges. An Oxford style school with mentors and customized content probably would have served me much better than colleges that continue on the same factory system setup that is broken at the lower levels.

The workplace hasn't been difficult for me, but I definitely learn a lot more than I ever did in school. I come across actual challenges that require research and stretch me. Perhaps that's just being a software engineer though.

[Sambdala]

Well, I think that theoretical guy would just be succeeding in a different industry than the one I happened to succeed in so far.

It's not like I didn't apply myself to anything, just not to schoolwork; except when I found a class interesting. As it turns out, the things I did apply myself to became my career rather than what I had gone to school for.

There's a large difference between "half assed four years of personal development" and simply concentrating more on things that are unrelated to your official studies.

In fact, one of the big reasons I'm striking out on my own (well, as part of a team) now is that I realized my day job was no longer providing me with nearly as much opportunity for personal development as it had during the first few years I worked there.

Edit: And the fact that it's entirely what you make of it isn't what's told to the 18 & 19 year olds heading off to college (at least not in the circle's I was in). What's told to kids is that it's the piece of paper that matters in today's society. Once you get it, you can do anything you want, but make sure you get that piece of paper or all opportunity will shut down for you forever and for always.

What causes these situations is the combined narrative that the piece of paper is what matters alongside the fact that getting that piece of paper is a highly gameable activity.

[ska]

Ok, "half assed four years..." was making some assumptions I shouldn't have. You could well have been doing other useful things at the time. At ~2hrs a week, you didn't actually find out what you could have done there, so that's a waste, but I understand being afraid to follow that conviction and drop college in favor of whatever you were finding interesting. I'm the last one to support the everyone-must-go-to-college message, but I understand it feeling risky.

Even in your circle though, I'm sure the (unfortunate) message was clear that the piece of paper was table stakes, not success. And every university has some variation of this message, repeatedly.

Table stakes get you a seat at the table, that's all. It's the things that aren't shown on that paper that decide what sort of a player you are. And success, in the end, is most of the time dependent on getting good at doing many of the sort of things you describe as struggling with, not because it's what you want to do, but because it's what is necessary to achieve what you are trying to do.

[treehau5]

I can relate to this so much it's not even funny. Don't let your fear of failure get in the way. I currently struggle with the same -- applying myself to a difficult task. Staying focused longer than 10 minutes at a time was difficult -- so difficult I was even suspicious I may of had adult ADHD. Turns out that I don't. What I have is the fear of failing and rejection. The fear of exposing my weaknesses to others, and my coping mechanism is procrastination. My procrastination shields me from the possibility of ever failing because, hey, I never gave it my best shot anyway, right?

Hopefully this wasn't too off base, Just thought I'd share as well because I related to this so much.

I wish you all the best!

[visarga]

> Staying focused longer than 10 minutes at a time was difficult

I found an unexpected solution in working with someone else - that is - not working alone on the project. The more social interaction is involved, the less I am affected by procrastination. You have to make yourself visible and accountable to other people, to feel shame if you slack off, to feel energized when you make progress and then discuss it with them. In other words, you need to have a person witnessing you as you work.

Think back - in school and while being employed you always had a teacher or boss to witness your work, you had colleagues, but when you are alone with a project, then all this social stabilizing effect is gone.

[PhasmaFelis]

I have severe ADD, and this is very much true for me as well. I look for reasons to "cross-train" with coworkers, having them sit in and comment on whatever I'm working on, because just having someone looking over my shoulder makes it so much easier to resist distraction. I'm hoping to develop more formal pair-programming practices.

[Evolved]

I've found that this can be applied to exercise as well. Not necessarily hiring a personal trainer but having someone who counts on you to meet them to go on a jog or meet at the gym and not wanting to let them down helps keep you accountable.

[kemist]

Terrific advice.

We're social creatures. When we work cooperatively with others we gain an enriched sense of accomplishment, even when know we could have done the work ourselves.

[treehau5]

This is definitely true!

I did my best work when we were on the pairing machines. However, we stopped using them as much because some of our work is so siloed. It was a shame. I am always looking to pair with people, but its very difficult I have found. I tried the online things, like the "#PairWithMe" initiative. No dice so far.

[throwaway623422]

> so difficult I was even suspicious I may of had adult ADHD. Turns out that I don't.

I want to thank you so much for writing this. I feel like I've heard this story a million times, but every single time it ends in the author self-diagnosing AD[H]D. This is literally the very first time I've ever heard of someone suspecting they had it and then ruling it out.

It's a relief to hear that there might be other possible causes of common problems.

[nilkn]

I know tons of high school students who attempt the strategies you just described. The great majority of them barely scrape by with Bs and Cs and they do indeed crash and burn in college. You are not even remotely a representative case.

[wavegeek]

Agree.

The guy who cruised though high school and even the early years of college only to crash and burn later on is so common it is a cliche. This is part of the price we pay for not challenging our brightest students.

With dumbed down courses these days it may be possible to get a degree without actually learning much. I know I have met a lot of people with IT degrees who could not program the foobar 'challenge' to save their lives.

[seanmcdirmid]

It actually depends more on what the college is and what the classes. Is it a party school and are the courses in a soft major? Or is it a tier one research university and the courses are weed outs for engineering or medical school?

I was one of those students in high school, and I could see it going either way (thankfully, I took the hard classes and got my act together).

[ploxiln]

Yeah, but isn't it annoying being told you're the equivalent of a representative case? When you're not?

[zrail]

I've experienced similar, to a lesser extent (I never cheated, I just didn't do the homework). I also recently struck out on my own and so far I've been successful. In your case, you may want to just farm out all of the non-passion-inducing work. Accountants, book keepers, virtual assistance, all of these are there to help you succeed.

[Sambdala]

I'm hiring a CSP to handle all the paperwork/taxes/etc and an assistant to handle organizing my appointments/schedule. I'm hoping that will be sufficient for at least the first six months or so.

[bytecoin]

What is a csp?

[Sambdala]

Corporate services provider.

[hnriot]

I think, although cannot speak for the person, they really meant CPA, they mention taxes and only a CPA would be legally able to do that.

[chipsa]

I think the "Corporate Services Provider" is a better fit. They would have a CPA on staff to sign off on the taxes.

[totalrobe]

What type of corporate jobs have you had? My experience has been quite the opposite...there is a ton of research, knowledge transfer, fire fighting, teamwork, meetings, writing, thinking, etc.

I am definitely not able to coast...although I'm a product manager, basically involved in everything across the company.

[nine_k]

As one of my colleagues once told to one of people like you, "I celebrate your existence because it guarantees my job security".

Do yourself a favor and study what you're actually interested in, seriously. Avoid places where you have to or even can coast, because it wastes your time and gets you used to wrong things. Also, such positions are usually dead-ends career-wise.

/* To tell the truth, I spent little time in university classes because they were too slow. I learned the same topics, and some more, myself, and worked a lot with professors on actual research. So I had pretty high [equivalent of] GPA and graduated well without much 'coasting'. */

[yummyfajitas]

Standardized tests even more so. Without any actual learning from the class itself, you can generally come close to ace'ing most high school tests by being moderately intelligent.

How do you do this? I mean if a test asks you to solve 3x^2+5+2x=7, how do you solve it without know the quadratic formula or some such?

There is a difference between gaming a test (in the sense of not knowing the material, but still passing) and simply learning the material very rapidly. If you actually know how to do the former, I'd love to hear a concrete explanation of the mechanics of it.

[bsilvereagle]

> Standardized tests even more so

Standardized tests are almost always multiple choice. So, given four (or five) possible answers for x, plug them all in and see which one equals 7. That's arguably faster than using the quadratic formula to solve the problem.

[dunder]

So in the US, math tests are multiple choice AND teachers don't even require the student to write down the process by which they've come to the conclusion?

Both of those seem unusual to me and I don't see how that method could possibly be beneficial in assessing knowledge.

[rayiner]

I went to school in the US and never had a multiple choice math test that counted for a grade. We'd also almost always get no credit for failing to show our work on tests or homework.

[JoshTheGeek]

The Florida standardized math tests and the SAT have fill-in math questions as well as multiple choice. Teachers themselves can choose whether the students must show their work for their tests. In my experience, most only check the answer, but some do check the work.

[bsilvereagle]

AP exams are the only standardized tests I have taken that were not multiple choice.

[VLM]

Even better, put it in standard form with coeff 3, 2 and -2 and just by inspection the answers have gotta be "around" the zero. So you can outright ignore the multiple choice answers like +1000, -1000, one bazillion, ...

Also there will be a lot of "stupid" answers on MC tests like listing three, four, five zeros for a quadratic to see if you understand the basic concept of what you're doing, always read the answers before you start. If you think you're getting five zeros out of a quadratic by some unusual plug and chug of the formula then you've already failed.

Another fun one... the discriminant of this one will be 28, right? Its simpler than solving the whole problem, I did this in my head in a couple seconds even though I'm pretty much asleep. So you'll have a bunch of boring rational number zeros which can't possibly be correct for that discriminant and one whacked out obviously irrational answer and that will be the correct answer.

[pmontra]

Interesting tests. How do they prepare for the real world, where the answers are to be found and not given?

[yummyfajitas]

I've seen variants of tests (maybe SAT Algebra?) where you fill in bubbles to choose a digit. (E.g., in column 1 you fill in a bubble next to []0, []1, []2, ..., []9, column 2 you fill in a bubble for the second digit, etc.) Cumbersome, but it would seem to overcome this.

This also only seems to be an issue for the narrow set of problems where checking the answer is a lot cheaper than solving it. Sounds to me like standardized tests are on the right track, we may just need a few small tweaks.

[mcintyre1994]

I don't understand how math answers without workings presented and marked are in any way useful or anywhere near "the right track"?

The first thing any teacher will tell you about UK math tests is write all your workings, because these are marked by a human. So if you're solving some complex statistical thing, and you type 0.535346 instead of 0.545346 so get the wrong answer, but all the steps are right, you get almost all the marks. There are so many places in late high school math where this matters that I can't imagine any use of a test that doesn't have a human look over workings.

Given there's probably only a few questions on each assessed topic, it seems much more important to know whether the student can apply the steps for solving a problem than to just give no marks to someone who makes a minor data entry mistake under exam pressure.

I thought math testing was already pretty bad because revision can be optimised so easily by learning to apply steps (not derive them) and by just doing past papers - but I had no idea anybody actually used an all or nothing approach to assessing these questions.

I don't even understand why you would mark it like that, unless you're only assessing math and other subjects you can feasibly reduce to objective answers. I mean, the point is presumably so a computer can mark it? But if you still bother assessing, say, English or History, presumably you still have to have a human mark them essays?

[yummyfajitas]

I don't understand how math answers without workings presented and marked are in any way useful or anywhere near "the right track"?

The goal is to have a score which is a) standardized and objective b) well correlated with mathematical knowledge in the curriculum.

Bsilvereagle identified a flaw with my particular example - students can substitute an easier problem for the real problem. But there are mechanisms to fix that. So given fixes for particular flawed questions like that, it seems like a typical standardized test will provide both (a) and (b).

It would be quite a coincidence if a student could write down the answer to many questions without knowing the intermediate steps, no? (I'm of course assuming security is sufficiently strong, i.e. no cheating.)

[kamaal]

>>I mean if a test asks you to solve 3x^2+5+2x=7, how do you solve it without know the quadratic formula or some such?

If you have memorized the general heuristic to solve any particular equation, its basically that is all there is to solving that equation. What is left after that is to practice that algorithm enough number of times until it just comes to you naturally when you see such equation again.

Richard Feynman, noted people find math difficult because all the while they are focusing on just that 'memorizing that algorithm' part. He used to call this as 'for people who don't know what they are doing'.

In school, or even in college, there are only a finite number of such algorithms to rote memorize. If you do, and practice those problem enough number of time, you can essentially score big marks in the exam.

Unfortunately the same is in software interviews these days. The most common algorithm experts you come across these days, are exactly algorithm experts. These are simply people who can recall all the algorithms they have rote memorized earlier. I know of people who spend dedicated time every day memorizing time and space complexity of many commonly asked interview algorithms on flash cards.

Ironically hiring such candidates at times is almost synonymous with hiring bad candidates.

[smsm42]

>> how do you solve it without know the quadratic formula or some such?

This is actually possible, if you've been taught to solve problems instead of being taught to apply magic formulas. Of course, one is rarely taught math this way now.

Let me try. Suppose you have 3x^2+5+2x=7. Now, you have no idea how to solve for x. But what you could solve? If you had something like (ax+b)^2 = c, then probably this would be easy for you to solve, right (of course, provided c is not negative, won't get into that now)? We just take square root of both parts, and then it's a simple linear equation. Now, we can notice we can also get rid of a, for simplicity, by dividing both parts by a and get something like (x+b)^2 = c. Which in our example should represent 3x^2+5+2x=7 or alternatively x^2 + 2/3x - 2/3 = 0. But how we find proper b and c?

So, is there a way to make that equation look like that with suitable values? Let's look at (x+b)^2 = x^2 + 2bx + b^2. We have 2bx = 2/3x which means b = 1/3. So we have (x+1/3)^2 on one side, and on the other side we have to get 2/3 and also additional 1/9 which is the b^2, meaning c would be 7/9. So, x + 1/3 is sqrt(7/9) with + or - sign (since square on non-zero root always has 2 options), and x would be that minus 1/3.

As you can see, we used no special magic formula - only thing we needed is how to write (x+b)^2, which is easy to see just by multiplying (x+b)*(x+b) by hand.

You can do cubic equations this way too, but it is considerably more laborious. Look up Cardano and Vieta methods. Doable but I wouldn't enjoy doing it by hand too much.

[yummyfajitas]

tl;dr; If you are really good at math, but didn't follow the math curriculum closely, you can probably rederive most of it. I'm not sure this counts as "gaming" a test. I'd describe it as "understanding the material really well and getting a high score."

Remember, the goal of an exam is to measure if you have the knowledge. Whether you got the knowledge by studying hard in a traditional classroom setting as scheduled by a syllabus is irrelevant.

[smsm42]

It doesn't really qualify as "really good" (I'm not - I know people who are and they are way beyond what I can do, I mean light years beyond). It's just a set of basic tools about how to approach problems. Like when programming you don't have to have library function for everything - you learn to write your own functions, etc. You don't have to be able to write your own OS (though some people can) but going beyond clicking buttons in Word is not a bad idea.

Of course, I do not see it as "gaming" - I see it as learning the right way. IMHO, all learning should start with that and formula should come after - as a shortcut, which you can take but you know if needed you could do it from scratch because you understand where it comes from.

[robbyking]

I very clearly remember when I realized getting good grades was easy, but learning and getting good grades was tough.

[pm]

I had this problem at high school, and it's taken me years to undo the expectation that everything should be easy. It happened to my brother too, except if something's too challenging for him, he just quits.

If you're gung-ho enough, expose yourself to the fire so you build up resistance. It's going to be rough once you start hitting walls.

[skunkworks]

Grit and determination is important for long-term success when your brilliance and creativity is less than world-class, and it requires honing and practice to build. Skating through school and gaming the system ends up short-circuiting that process. Hence, lazy smart guys.

[damon_c]

I had a very similar experience and I have found that being independent/freelance is the way to go because your actual performance and productivity actually matter for once. You can still get by and even be very successful without applying yourself but if you want to do that, you need to find work that allows for such. That is a skill in itself and may itself require actual effort.

[undata]

Entrepreneurship will be a fantastic experience for you, succeed or fail. It's exactly what you need.

[wavegeek]

I am sure you're aware of Paul Graham's essays but this one is very pertinent to your situation.

http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html

[orky56]

Similar situation and ventured on my own. Crashed and burned since the incentives are very much different. Lots of other issues too but best of luck. It's a wakeup call for sure and completely for the best.

[tim333]

There may be similar ways to game thing as an entrepreneur. There seems to be a lot of activity out there reminiscent of copying the other kids homework.