One of my brothers is a physics undergrad at Caltech. He described the Caltech curriculum as having a “fire hose” feel where the professors throw one thing after another at you in rapid succession, trusting you to reconstruct that knowledge later as necessary. From what I’ve heard, MIT has a similar approach. This seems opposed to a spaced repetition approach where you make sure each chunk of knowledge is a solid, permanent block before proceeding.
One possibility is that the “fire hose” approach does get you spaced repetition for core concepts that you end up seeing in many different ways over the course of your study. It’s also possible that what’s best for elite engineering students doesn’t work well for everyone, or that elite engineering students are going to succeed no matter what approach you take, so curriculum design doesn’t matter much.
One of my brothers is a physics undergrad at Caltech. He described the Caltech curriculum as having a “fire hose” feel where the professors throw one thing after another at you in rapid succession, trusting you to reconstruct that knowledge later as necessary. From what I’ve heard, MIT has a similar approach. This seems opposed to a spaced repetition approach where you make sure each chunk of knowledge is a solid, permanent block before proceeding.
One possibility is that the “fire hose” approach does get you spaced repetition for core concepts that you end up seeing in many different ways over the course of your study. It’s also possible that what’s best for elite engineering students doesn’t work well for everyone, or that elite engineering students are going to succeed no matter what approach you take, so curriculum design doesn’t matter much.