I see your point and this is what I have more or less been repeatedly told.I think like you told,the best thing to do would be to condense a lot of courses down to their key concepts that can be kept refreshed through spaced repetition.
I think 90% may be an underestimate(you could probably tell me more about it).Like, over the course of your career,you would have used less than 10% of the info you collected through your college(including all the nitty-gritties of various topics-the derivations,the special cases etc..).These contribute immensely to your understanding of the topic,but my question is do the nitty-gritties stay after a long time? This is my main question. I’m quite alarmed at the possibility that I might not remember something that I had understood so well when I need to use it and like you told generally people seem to be getting on well without it.
For example,lets take the situation you mentioned, a preliminary understanding of Control Theory had helped you identify the problem and correlate it with your existing problem.Even if the problem demanded a more in-depth and a rigorous analysis using Control theory(one that you would have easily done just after finishing the course), you would have not been able to do it and would probably have to spend time reading up on it(the time may be lower than if you were reading it completely new).But mostly you benefitted from the preliminary/broad understanding of the course than the full blown one.It would have been much more efficient(as in you could’ve done a lotta other stuff),if you had instead initially spent your time just getting upto speed on the very broad view of the topic and used spaced repetition to strengthen it.of course we can debate on the exact amount of content,but we can agree that the full blown one is probably waaay off.
I also agree with what Kaj said.But “Control Systems” is a course that you know, you wont use in anywhere near full capacity when you become a Mechanical engineer.And there a lot of courses to which you can say that(as in you definitely know that you wouldnt want to work work in any field involving that majorly).
This whole thing occurred to me because I realized I was learning a lot of stuff that I didn’t like and probably want even gonna use.Now my concern,there a lot of stuff that i really invested time on -so how do I make sure that I am going to be able to use them
I guess I wasn’t counting every little derivation or example or even formula that comes up in a class against that 90%. Those are things you see in lecture, but you don’t “learn” them. The stuff you actually learn is concepts and techniques, like what you would need to answer the test questions. Even that stuff, of course, you’ll mostly forget if you don’t review it regularly. But… I’m not very confident that you can strip out all the stuff you’re going to forget and still learn the stuff you would have remembered. I don’t know of any real examples of this working. It seems like maybe the academic system of “present a whole bunch of info rapidly and then force students to study key ideas from it for homework and tests” might have become entrenched over time because it performs better than the obvious alternatives.
I would love to see evidence of something better, though. It seems like good use of spaced repetition is a non-obvious candidate to replace the lecture-homework-test system. If you haven’t seen quantum.country, that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking of and my initial experience with it is promising.
I see your point and this is what I have more or less been repeatedly told.I think like you told,the best thing to do would be to condense a lot of courses down to their key concepts that can be kept refreshed through spaced repetition.
I think 90% may be an underestimate(you could probably tell me more about it).Like, over the course of your career,you would have used less than 10% of the info you collected through your college(including all the nitty-gritties of various topics-the derivations,the special cases etc..).These contribute immensely to your understanding of the topic,but my question is do the nitty-gritties stay after a long time? This is my main question. I’m quite alarmed at the possibility that I might not remember something that I had understood so well when I need to use it and like you told generally people seem to be getting on well without it.
For example,lets take the situation you mentioned, a preliminary understanding of Control Theory had helped you identify the problem and correlate it with your existing problem.Even if the problem demanded a more in-depth and a rigorous analysis using Control theory(one that you would have easily done just after finishing the course), you would have not been able to do it and would probably have to spend time reading up on it(the time may be lower than if you were reading it completely new).But mostly you benefitted from the preliminary/broad understanding of the course than the full blown one.It would have been much more efficient(as in you could’ve done a lotta other stuff),if you had instead initially spent your time just getting upto speed on the very broad view of the topic and used spaced repetition to strengthen it.of course we can debate on the exact amount of content,but we can agree that the full blown one is probably waaay off.
I also agree with what Kaj said.But “Control Systems” is a course that you know, you wont use in anywhere near full capacity when you become a Mechanical engineer.And there a lot of courses to which you can say that(as in you definitely know that you wouldnt want to work work in any field involving that majorly).
This whole thing occurred to me because I realized I was learning a lot of stuff that I didn’t like and probably want even gonna use.Now my concern,there a lot of stuff that i really invested time on -so how do I make sure that I am going to be able to use them
I guess I wasn’t counting every little derivation or example or even formula that comes up in a class against that 90%. Those are things you see in lecture, but you don’t “learn” them. The stuff you actually learn is concepts and techniques, like what you would need to answer the test questions. Even that stuff, of course, you’ll mostly forget if you don’t review it regularly. But… I’m not very confident that you can strip out all the stuff you’re going to forget and still learn the stuff you would have remembered. I don’t know of any real examples of this working. It seems like maybe the academic system of “present a whole bunch of info rapidly and then force students to study key ideas from it for homework and tests” might have become entrenched over time because it performs better than the obvious alternatives.
I would love to see evidence of something better, though. It seems like good use of spaced repetition is a non-obvious candidate to replace the lecture-homework-test system. If you haven’t seen quantum.country, that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking of and my initial experience with it is promising.