At Caltech, homework was assigned but had no bearing on your grade. The grades were based on the midterm and final exams.
But not mastering the homework usually resulted in flunking the exams. There were "retch" sessions after each homework assignment that was staffed by a grad student, and the purpose was to help the students understand the homework problems. I knew only one person (Hal Finney) who was so smart he didn't need to do the homework.
I learned the hard way that the path to success was:
1. never miss a lecture, no matter what
2. take notes by hand during lecture
3. do the homework on time, and make sure you understand every problem. Take advantage of the retch sessions.
And that worked for me.
We didn't call them retch sessions, and they were taught by the instructors though. We also were encouraged to peer tutor and since we were all restricted to one building the homework was always group work allowed.
Also had badges to track time spent in the building for required study hours, though some people gave up and just slept at their desks when they started sliding down the grade scale and the hours racked up.
Generally I think I did 30 hours of studying/homework (went up and down depending on what was being taught, but was around that) a week (for 12-15 hours of actual lecturing), with some of my friends putting in 50% more. Generally the only day we weren't there was Saturdays. Most of the day Sunday was usually spent in class preparing for the next week.
The general pattern at Caltech was 2 hours of study for every hour of lecture. Which was quite a shock to me.
I found that (1) I didn't need to take anywhere near as many notes during lecture and (2) I could ask way, way, way more relevant questions.
This also helped tremendously when it came to studying for the actuarial exams.
So the endgame was figuring out what the tests in previous years looked like (cause it was likely gonna be a copy paste affair), do a targeted study run for those exercises and 9/10 you would pass.
As a student of a top-tier French Master's degree, I consulted with a teacher to deal with exhaustion and to ask for a class rescheduling for my case. Explaining my situation, the teacher looks at me and interjected:
—Waitwaitwait. You... you went to all lectures!?
And he was right. Rather than following the curriculum, I should have developed my taste for various engineering topics and only used the classes as entertainment.
When I was there, a long time ago, exams were timed and were usually open book open note. Blue books were filled in. You were trusted to adhere by those rules, and most students did their exams in their dorm rooms.
The evidence that the students honored the rules was some exams resulted in a 50% failure rate.
As for me, I went there because I wanted to learn the material. I did not care about getting a diploma. (Mine is in the basement somewhere.) I did not take any "easy A" classes, because I wanted a return on my time and tuition investment. (Though, easy A classes were hard to find at Caltech.) I wasn't even going to attend graduation, but my parents showed up and I attended to please them.
The classes, year by year, were dependent on mastering the previous year's classes. So if you cheat with AI, you're digging yourself into a bigger and bigger hole. Caltech rewires your brain. If you don't learn the stuff, you're going to be one of those EEs who carries around a card with V=A*R, V/A=R, V/R=A printed on it.
Optional homework is often a disaster. At best, students would do it right before an exam and the goal of education is not to just pass exams. They’d probably still get a lower score than if they did the homework when they were supposed to.
What I think is better is to have a due date, but just make the maximum 10% each day it is late. So after 2 days, the highest score you could receive would be 80%.
I liked that system because it gave some flexibility with deadlines while still encouraging you to turn things in on time.
Do you have evidence for this beyond your friends (who were accepted into college)?
this rhetoric is pretending to be an alternative to coercion. IMO the ideas you are talking about are well trodden and are still coercion nonetheless.
Education system, contrary to popular belief/name, isn't tailored to educate but to select winners and losers which then will be picked on the job market.
That's why it seems absurd when you think about it as an institution that aims to educate. That's because that isn't the real purpose of it. The purpose is to stratify and classify early.
Schools do not operate in a vacuum; they serve as credentialing gatekeepers for a hyper-competitive capitalist job market. If everyone could easily retake exams until they got an A, grades would lose their primary utility for employers and universities: differentiation. Society relies on schools to provide a neat hierarchy of candidates that for one reason or another thrived in difficult environment of adolescent schooling.
The system often prioritizes compliance, endurance of boredom, and social maneuvering over actual critical thinking precisely because those traits align with corporate hierarchies.