FWIW, for most people who are smart enough to get into MIT, it’s reasonably trivial to get good grades in high school (I went to an unusually difficult high school, took the hardest possible courseload, and was able to shunt this to <5 hours of Actual Work a week / spent most of my class time doing more useful things).
I have this sense people live in dark matter universes, where some social groups at uni talk to each other about the slog all the time, and some social groups talk about all the fun stuff they do with all of their extra the time. And these can both be true, just that they forget about each other.
Like, me and my roommate at Uni both came from the same high-school. He had such an easy time he started doing math research in undergrad. I had a horrible time and barely graduated. There’s both types. (I’d say he had a notably easier time at high-school than me too — well, I think he actually did much harder courses and got higher grades, so not easier exactly, but you see what I mean.)
My current guess is most people do a ton of work while at top unis and that it’s optimized for having that effect, but that the people who do best are the peak IQ folks who find it easy.
This seems wrong to me? Hard to say because it was so long ago but I imagine I spent at least 15 hours a week on homework. I went to a basically normal public high school, and while most of the work wasn’t hard for me (varying between mindnumbingly easy and moderately challenging), there was just so much of it that it took a ton of time. Sure I wasn’t ‘working smart’, and I was a perfectionist to an unreasonable level, and I cared too much about what my teachers thought of me, but I imagine none of those things are unusual for kids trying to get into good schools.
FWIW, for most people who are smart enough to get into MIT, it’s reasonably trivial to get good grades in high school (I went to an unusually difficult high school, took the hardest possible courseload, and was able to shunt this to <5 hours of Actual Work a week / spent most of my class time doing more useful things).
I have this sense people live in dark matter universes, where some social groups at uni talk to each other about the slog all the time, and some social groups talk about all the fun stuff they do with all of their extra the time. And these can both be true, just that they forget about each other.
Like, me and my roommate at Uni both came from the same high-school. He had such an easy time he started doing math research in undergrad. I had a horrible time and barely graduated. There’s both types. (I’d say he had a notably easier time at high-school than me too — well, I think he actually did much harder courses and got higher grades, so not easier exactly, but you see what I mean.)
My current guess is most people do a ton of work while at top unis and that it’s optimized for having that effect, but that the people who do best are the peak IQ folks who find it easy.
This seems wrong to me? Hard to say because it was so long ago but I imagine I spent at least 15 hours a week on homework. I went to a basically normal public high school, and while most of the work wasn’t hard for me (varying between mindnumbingly easy and moderately challenging), there was just so much of it that it took a ton of time. Sure I wasn’t ‘working smart’, and I was a perfectionist to an unreasonable level, and I cared too much about what my teachers thought of me, but I imagine none of those things are unusual for kids trying to get into good schools.
That’s fair, I guess that’s more like hundreds of hours and I was thinking of more typical students when I suggested thousands.