In primary school i used to just not study or take notes and just used my “gifted kid” abilities to soak up as much info as i could during class and then when i didnt know something during the exam i would go back to look at the questions and try to extrapolate the answers. Still works sometimes when im in a pinch.
I did what you describe until I had to do the IB in 11th and 12th grade… the IB was crazy. I think my first two years of college were literally easier than IB.
I did it in ib as well cause i went to a really hard highscool and then moved to ib so i knew most of the chemistry, phyiscs and math already. I did have to study for my other subjects tho.
Yeah, I think my highschool kinda fucked me over. It was one of those stupid “international” highschools where we did the IGCSE before the IB — and the IGCSEs suuuuuuck. I literally didn’t study at all and got an A in Math. I think it did jack shit to prepare me. You may be able to tell I still have quite a bit of festered up anger towards the IGCSE… 😬
I went to school in mainland europe so its different there but im really mad at the school i went to for fucking everyone over. They did not teach the ib curriculum how they shouldve and then they were surprised the passing rates were like 40%.
Wait… You’re supposed to take notes? And study outside of class?!
i am learning new things while reading these questions
Lol I’ve had to essentially derive formulas that I should have memorized mid test before. Or reverse engineer examples from other questions to figure out the concept needed for another question (again, should have known that going in). I used to take absurdly long tests due to stunts like these, but tbh it usually worked. I distinctly remember discovering how logarithms worked mid-test at some point, for example
Reminds me of highschool math. At some point you needed a graphical calculator, you could upload programs onto them but that required hooking them up to a computer with a crazy expensive data cable. So I found a schematic, ordered the components for a fraction of that price and learned to solder. It looked ugly AF, but it worked. Next step I wrote a program containing the formula’s I needed, uploaded it and installed a program which hid your program menu until you pressed a certain key combination. It could even simulate a hard reset, as you could get spot-checked and asked to do just that.
I could also have just memorised the formula’s, but that wouldn’t have been fun. And unlike all those formula’s I still use my soldering and programming skills. 😋
Respect dude. Those cables are stupidly expensive (to match the calculators I guess), I just bit the bullet on mine
Well, it did help that they used a simple serial connection back then and didn’t require any advanced electronics. Just a bunch of resistors and basic stuff like that, all relatively large components that are easy to solder with what I had back then. I’m not sure how easy it would be these days with USB.
USB is actually really easy too. It’s only four wires.
Understandable soldering bollocks
In a way I think being able to derive a formula is a much more valuable skill than rote memorisation, especially in higher education. That being said I’ve also done this when I was just lazy and didn’t remember my lessons…
Yeah hell my statics lecturer encouraged it
Exactly. Tho i only had 45 minutes usually cause thats how long my classes in primary were.
I did that for my entire time in school.
I used to think I was just very smart. Now I know that it was mostly attention deficit and a near perfect memory. A memory that I had trained by with this beat up self-help meditation book that I found. It taught a real method of meditation, but also promised magic mind powers. I found it when I was like 7, so I practiced the fuck out of those basic techniques.
These days, I train my memory by reading 20-30 different webnovels that update anywhere between daily and once every 2-3 months. Still haven’t gotten a real handle on that attention deficit though…
Passed a literature class exam this way once. Didn’t read the book at all. Just listened in class. Building associations and connections in the test content and applying some deductive reasoning works way better than teachers think.
I think that’s just called learning
Yeah, but doing at test time is the novelty 😉
I had an…interesting…take home exam in college. The max score was 100, but the test had 200 points. So, if confident, you could answer half the exam and still get the highest score; if not confident in answers, you could answer more questions and rely on partial credit
It was a week long take home, “open everything” (book/Internet, but no discussions online or IRL). In some ways the hardest exam I ever took, but I learned a lot, and some of the questions were specifically meant to introduce new subjects.
And then OpenAI ruined it all. They’d never give us an exam like that today
After failing the test ”You’re absolutely right, the answer is most definitely C.”
Apparently college computer science classes are now doing paper exams… I can’t even imagine learning the standard library of the language the prof chose (nowadays probably C++ which I despise and has a crazy standard library) so well I could write code on paper without completion and LSP. And without editing! Writing code outside of neovim already seems like torture.
And it’s all AI’s fault. I swear to god, AI has ruined programming.
I’m guessing you never had to write an IT exam in Germany at any point before the introduction of LLMs. (╥﹏╥)
fuckin hooah
I did have aha moments during tests. It’s not too late.
I’ve literally had this happen. Doing a doctorate in engineering rn and this is real.
I taught myself titrations on my first chem final.
Of course, I still failed because that was the first time I showed up since the first week.
Okay fine I didn’t study! Are you happy now?! Jerk yourself off already
My entire GCSE experience back in the day 🥲
