On the angle of demonstrating that you can learn the material and the skills and generally proving your math mettle: Can you study the books, do a sampling of the problems in the back of each chapter until you think you’ve mastered it, and then take the tests directly, without being signed up for a class? Maybe find old exams, perhaps from other institutions (surely someone somewhere has published an exam on each subject)? Or, for that matter, print out copies of old Putnam contests, set a timer, and see how well you do?
As someone who never entered college in the first place, I consider it a prosocial thing to make college degrees less correlated with competence. Don’t add to the tragedy of that commons!
In principle, yes: to the extent that I’m worried that my current study habits don’t measure up to school standards along at least some dimensions, I could take that into account and try to change my habits without the school.
But—as much as it pains me to admit it—I … kind of do expect the social environment of school to be helpful along some dimensions (separately from how it’s super-toxic among other dimensions)?
When I informally audited Honors Analysis at UC Berkeley with Charles Pugh in Fall 2017, Prof. Pugh agreed to grade my midterm (and I did OK), but I didn’t get the weekly homework exercises graded. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I also didn’t finish all of the weekly homework exercises.
I attempted a lot of them! I verifiably do othermathstuff that the vast majority of school students don’t. But if I’m being honest and not ideological about it (even though my ideology is obviously directionally correct relative to Society’s), the social fiction of “grades” does look like it sometimes succeeds at extorting some marginal effort out of my brain, and if I didn’t have my historical reasons for being ideological about it, I’m not sure I’d even regret that much more than I regret being influenced by the social fiction of GitHub commit squares.
I agree that me getting the goddamned piece of paper and putting it on a future résumé has some nonzero effect in propping up the current signaling equilibrium, which is antisocial, but I don’t think the magnitude of the effect is large enough to worry about, especially given the tier of school and my geriatric condition. The story told by the details of my résumé is clearly “autodidact who got the goddamned piece of paper, eventually.” No one is going to interpret it as an absurd “I graduated SFSU at age 37 and am therefore racially superior to you” nobility claim, even though that does work for people who did Harvard or MIT at the standard age.
On the angle of demonstrating that you can learn the material and the skills and generally proving your math mettle: Can you study the books, do a sampling of the problems in the back of each chapter until you think you’ve mastered it, and then take the tests directly, without being signed up for a class? Maybe find old exams, perhaps from other institutions (surely someone somewhere has published an exam on each subject)? Or, for that matter, print out copies of old Putnam contests, set a timer, and see how well you do?
As someone who never entered college in the first place, I consider it a prosocial thing to make college degrees less correlated with competence. Don’t add to the tragedy of that commons!
In principle, yes: to the extent that I’m worried that my current study habits don’t measure up to school standards along at least some dimensions, I could take that into account and try to change my habits without the school.
But—as much as it pains me to admit it—I … kind of do expect the social environment of school to be helpful along some dimensions (separately from how it’s super-toxic among other dimensions)?
When I informally audited Honors Analysis at UC Berkeley with Charles Pugh in Fall 2017, Prof. Pugh agreed to grade my midterm (and I did OK), but I didn’t get the weekly homework exercises graded. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I also didn’t finish all of the weekly homework exercises.
I attempted a lot of them! I verifiably do other math stuff that the vast majority of school students don’t. But if I’m being honest and not ideological about it (even though my ideology is obviously directionally correct relative to Society’s), the social fiction of “grades” does look like it sometimes succeeds at extorting some marginal effort out of my brain, and if I didn’t have my historical reasons for being ideological about it, I’m not sure I’d even regret that much more than I regret being influenced by the social fiction of GitHub commit squares.
I agree that me getting the goddamned piece of paper and putting it on a future résumé has some nonzero effect in propping up the current signaling equilibrium, which is antisocial, but I don’t think the magnitude of the effect is large enough to worry about, especially given the tier of school and my geriatric condition. The story told by the details of my résumé is clearly “autodidact who got the goddamned piece of paper, eventually.” No one is going to interpret it as an absurd “I graduated SFSU at age 37 and am therefore racially superior to you” nobility claim, even though that does work for people who did Harvard or MIT at the standard age.