The exam was huge, at least over 10 pages, and even when we technically ran out of time, the professor was kind enough to move the remaining exam takers to the neighboring lecture hall to continue taking it. I recall I spent a total of 2 hours on that exam.
Now mind you it was mostly short answer or multiple choice questions. The multiple choice questions were pretty sharp too, lots of traps and false but sounds right answers mixed in. But if it had been purely essay questions, I would have been screwed.
However with such a huge corpus of information in front of me, I ended up basically learning all the material on the spot. I just kept doing multiple passes through it, each time I noticed one of my answers contradicted one of the others, I would make adjustments to harmonize, which indirectly refined my understanding.
In the end I got B+ in the exam (which was curved to an A), and walked out understanding the material better than I did walking in.
Reflecting in the experience years later, I've wondered if a hypothetical LLM which was ignorant of microbiology could do the same thing if fed that exam. In some respects the traps they placed in the multiple choice questions actually were what helped me refine my understanding the most. Made me appreciate information theory more.
This strategy saved my ass on so many tests from high school through college that I did not study properly for.
I think it would certainly be possible to write a test such that this strategy doesn’t work at all, but lucky for me no one did in any meaningful way.
In one of the studies they got incoming CS students to fill out a multiple choice exam on programming, before the class had even started. Then they looked for hints in their exam results to see if they predicted the end of semester grade.
Turned out following this strategy was an incredibly strong predictor of success in computer science. Some students somehow got 0 (or close to it) in the multiple choice test. But the researchers looked at their answers, and could see that the student was forming hypotheses about the questions. Even if they got all the answers wrong, they answered all of them with a consistent idea of what the computer programs might have meant.
Weak students just answered each question individually based on vibe, without using what they learned (or figured out) from other questions.
This has affected me a lot though, I know what is going on in songs, but can't ever remember the right words, but still some how end up sining stuff that means the same thing :/
So if I put a visual bend on something I can quickly understand it and remember it, but that bend has to be mind (even when helped by an image on a book). If it’s someone else’s, I’ll be very hard pressed to remember it (but I can easily remember where it was).
So at school, when I had to cram, I fill my head with images and things like that. And with the help of the exams (written) and memory of the classes, I worked out the answers.
For me, I have the bad "factual" memory and good "conceptual" memory but unlike you, I also have aphantasia: a completely "dark" mind with no visuals.
I've always used the metaphor that my brain has really good "compression". Once I learn something it gets compressed into my worldview. I don't know how or why I know it but I can apply it. If academic achievement is any benchmark, I can apply it with above average aptitude.
Most of us turn out like the rescued exotic bird which turns out to be a seagull covered in curry.
but you can also favorite comments for your own hall of fame, eg https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=andybak&comments=t
The actual intelligence segregation is self-selected. PMC parents live together in the same neighborhoods. Whether you believe in genetic or social factors, the smart kids come from here.
In the 80s and 90s there was an educational culture that believed in finding overlooked geniuses regardless of where they are from. That narrative is completely dead. All institutions expect kids to come prepared with a resume from their youth, and have few avenues for identifying talent that doesn't meet their mold.
In areas where parents aren't demanding advanced classes, there is no program for the government to identify and separate top performers from the general student population.
Yeah mine didn't have it. And the teachers fought every attempt to do so because it hurt their metrics (who gets stuck with the lower class average).
Are you by chance part of the PMC and your local school district is of similar demographics?
I actually always thought it was the opposite for me – I had to figure out how to work things out from scratch because I could never remember anything.
I found a solution recently. "Critical mass." If I just don't see something frequently enough, my brain keeps deleting it.
So, if there's a fact you have trouble remembering, try memorizing it 100 times in one day. That's "inefficient", as far as memory goes, but it'll do the trick! And I like solving problems once and then moving on.
(Anki, conversely, is designed for efficiency, which means it's designed to be as painful and unrewarding as possible, but that's a rant for another time... suffice it to say if you design your software so that I constantly want to stop using it, your efficiency drops to zero!)
Anki kept flagging my relatives birthdays as "leeches!"
I found it kind of hilarious and infuriating that the software I used to remember things tells me "this thing is hard for you to remember so you should just give up."