This strategy, which I’ll call ultralearning, is the act of flipping that original intuition on its head. Instead, what I’m arguing is that, contrary to the gut instinct of many lazy college students, the only way to get good enough in such a short time is to go deep. But that should be obvious-throwing more time at the problem could only make things worse if you switched to a far less effective method. Let me be clear, learning calculus in fifteen days will be less effective than fifty or five-hundred days. Memorizing and cramming, while they seem like they’ll do the trick are actually too slow. It’s only by really learning these, and then aggressively practicing their most common instantiations, that you have any chance of doing well on an exam that has novel problems. The principles are less numerous than the superficial details. Instead it’s the opposite, striving to deeply understand the fundamental principles. Not a trick to memorize things or a gimmick to be able to perform well. The trick to passing a calculus exam in fifteen days, is to actually learn calculus. “The trick is not minding that it hurts.” “That hurts!” he then exclaims, “Well, what’s the trick then?” Seeing this, another man tries to repeat the feat, yelping in pain. There’s a great scene in Lawrence of Arabia where the titular character, played by Peter O’Toole, lights a match and then snuffs it out with the tips of his fingers. Having seen something before is hardly preparation to solve novel problems.Īs strange as it may seem, I’m going to argue the opposite-the only possible hope you’d have of learning calculus well enough to pass an exam would be to actually learn it, and learn it deeply. This might work for a class which requires you to regurgitate answers, but not if you have to solve problems. Even if you know you’ll forget everything shortly after. Get yourself in front of a textbook or notes and review intensely, trying to hold in as much information as you can until after the exam. If you’re going to be exposed to questions you’ve never seen before, memorizing anything other than the most general of procedures is going to be useless. If you learn everything by rote, you can spit it out on the exam paper, then forget it.īut this only works if your exam questions are narrowly constrained. If you had fifteen days to learn calculus well enough to pass a comprehensive exam, starting from scratch, how would you do it?Ī gut reaction might be to memorize.
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