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Jack comments on MIT Challenge: blogger to attempt CS curriculum on own - Less Wrong
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Comments (43)
Good on him for trying! This'll surely be a failure of ambition, if it is one.
The impression I get from most comp sci students (and the CS classes I've taken) is that the assignments are where a lot of the learning happens. If the professor of a course had most of the points coming from assignments (I do not know if this is the case for any MIT CS classes), then that suggests to me that just taking the final is an insufficient measure of proficiency.
Likewise, his serial method of "consume a class, test, repeat" seems to fly in the face of spaced repetition. If he manages to get a D in the final exam for all the classes a week after reading through the lecture notes, but then does poorly when he takes the first exam again, this suggests this may not be a useful method to learn material. (Of course, there's good reason to believe the semester model also sucks.)
I don't think he plans on not doing assignments- he just isn't grading them. Pre-exam assignments are mostly there to a) help students avoid procrastinating on learning the material and b) insure against bad luck or nerves on exam day.
Jack is mostly correct. I am planning to do assignments, however my goal is to do these later in the program where I feel the most value will come out. I've done light programming as a hobby for years, so I'm not unfamiliar with the approach, my goal is to maximize my theoretical basis of knowledge, not necessarily to become a superstar programmer (which I believe comes after years of deliberate practice, not necessarily through college anyhow). As for evaluative basis, most of the final exams I'll be writing are at least 50%, so there is at least an argument to be made that they are substantive and not peripheral to the content.
Vaniver is also correct about spaced repetition. My reason for taking this approach is to make my process more flexible early on. Once I figure out the best methods to teach myself, it will be safer to switch to doing more classes in parallel where I can get the long-term benefits of spaced repetition. As for the grading measurement, that's a completely reasonable critique. I hope to explore the tradeoffs of this approach compared to an actual MIT program and discuss that, since there will inevitably be places my methods leave weaker than a traditional program.