But that's cheating!
-
@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
@Jaloopa said in But that's cheating!:
My memorisation skills served me very well until they didn't, when I got to the last year of university and discovered I'd never really learned to study because it had always come so easily to me before. When I came to concepts I didn't grasp as intuitively it started to fall apart a bit
Had a similar issue. Never worked as hard for a D as I did for Organic Chemistry. First class that I didn't just "get".
If we're doing confessions--I didn't learn to really work academically until grad school. Until then, I could just coast. I'd go to class, do any required homework, but I wouldn't really take notes or study. I only bought the textbooks if I needed to use them for homework.
But frankly, my real core math skills suck. But once I got past the parts where I needed to actually do numbers and everything was symbolic, I was fine. Because symbolic math is just a language, and I'm good at languages, mainly because I'd read everything in sight voraciously as a kid. I'm a fast reader and I pick up the details well enough to answer questions about them without conscious effort. And always have been.
For me, school (including a PhD) was the easy path. I rarely had to actually work at anything. And was really good at BS'ing and deducing answers so that even if I didn't actually know the answer, I could interpolate and guess with a good degree of accuracy and very good speed.
Grad school was, well, not so easy. Especially with the good professors who expected lots of work and wouldn't settle for my usual "do half the derivation, then jump to the answer which I had intuited based on the physical principles but couldn't tell you exactly how I got there" tricks.
-
I am not sure that I ever really learned to how work academically. I failed calc 1 the first time I took it and it just clicked the second time and I had straight A's until Applied Mathmatics where I decided that I was never going to be a math major. (I absolutely hate doing proofs and I suck at doing them).
Only thing I regret about college is not getting my chem E. degree. I got discouraged by failing organic chem after working so hard when I had A's in all my math and comp. sci classes, so I just stuck to those and dropped my Chem E. classes. If I had stuck to them maybe I would have learned how to study, maybe.
I'm a fast reader and I pick up the details well enough to answer questions about them without conscious effort. And always have been.
Yeah, book reports were always a breeze as I could generally remember the exact page and paragrpah when I needed quotes for a paper.
-
-
@HardwareGeek said in But that's cheating!:
@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
I absolutely hate doing proofs and I suck at doing them
I got in trouble in high school geometry for skipping the "obvious" steps (ie A=A). I concur in my hatred of formal proofs.
For some reason, doing epsilon-delta proofs in college wasn't quite as bad. Still yucky, but not as bad.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in But that's cheating!:
Multiple choice tests are a necessary evil that should be kept to a minimum IMO. Necessary because there's no way you can test over all the material otherwise and still be able to grade it and give feedback in anything like a reasonable time, even for small classes. Evil because it's a (comparatively) low-validity measure that can be gamed in many ways (including simple logic + guessing or other side-channel attacks that aren't even cheating).
According to an academic colleague I used to work with, there are ways to mitigate the flaws of multiple choice tests, such as taking points off for a wrong answer or even making it so that if there's more than a threshold number wrong, the test is failed no matter how many are right. Doesn't stop me from hating multichoice approaches.
-
@HardwareGeek said in But that's cheating!:
@Benjamin-Hall Some people are so clueless, they probably would have failed even if you'd left the worked-out problem written on the whiteboard with a box around labeled "This is the answer to problem #1".
Yes, I've done that as well. I created an exam on the topic of Astronomy and titled it as such. I.e, a big fat "Astronomy Exam" in 24 pt font above the whole thing.
Then you were to write down your name.
And directly after that, a simple multiple-choice question:
What do you call the science of the stars?
a) Astrology
b) Astronomy
c) PlanetologyOnly 80% got it right. It was intended as an: "Let's ease you into the exam by giving you a free point."
-
@Rhywden said in But that's cheating!:
@HardwareGeek said in But that's cheating!:
@Benjamin-Hall Some people are so clueless, they probably would have failed even if you'd left the worked-out problem written on the whiteboard with a box around labeled "This is the answer to problem #1".
Yes, I've done that as well. I created an exam on the topic of Astronomy and titled it as such. I.e, a big fat "Astronomy Exam" in 24 pt font above the whole thing.
Then you were to write down your name.
And directly after that, a simple multiple-choice question:
What do you call the science of the stars?
a) Astrology
b) Astronomy
c) PlanetologyOnly 80% got it right. It was intended as an: "Let's ease you into the exam by giving you a free point."
Reading. It's hard.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in But that's cheating!:
@HardwareGeek said in But that's cheating!:
@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
I absolutely hate doing proofs and I suck at doing them
I got in trouble in high school geometry for skipping the "obvious" steps (ie A=A). I concur in my hatred of formal proofs.
For some reason, doing epsilon-delta proofs in college wasn't quite as bad. Still yucky, but not as bad.
Yeah, I decided that teaching Math was not for me when I got a demerit for not explicitly stating that you cannot take more balls out of the urn than there are balls in said urn. Switched to Chemistry and was much happier
blowing stuff upwith safely exploring the ground states of elementary gasses
-
@dkf said in But that's cheating!:
@Benjamin-Hall said in But that's cheating!:
Multiple choice tests are a necessary evil that should be kept to a minimum IMO. Necessary because there's no way you can test over all the material otherwise and still be able to grade it and give feedback in anything like a reasonable time, even for small classes. Evil because it's a (comparatively) low-validity measure that can be gamed in many ways (including simple logic + guessing or other side-channel attacks that aren't even cheating).
According to an academic colleague I used to work with, there are ways to mitigate the flaws of multiple choice tests, such as taking points off for a wrong answer or even making it so that if there's more than a threshold number wrong, the test is failed no matter how many are right. Doesn't stop me from hating multichoice approaches.
One really fun form of multiple choice is what I call multiple multiples. Where M of the N answers (M <= N) are correct, and you have to select all the correct answers to get credit. Both questions and answers are usually worded in such twisty,
ways that they're a nightmare.
-
@Dragoon said in But that's cheating!:
Only thing I regret about college is not getting my chem E. degree. I got discouraged by failing organic chem after working so hard when I had A's in all my math and comp. sci classes, so I just stuck to those and dropped my Chem E. classes. If I had stuck to them maybe I would have learned how to study, maybe.
Yeah, chemistry is one of those subjects where you simply are forced to learn quite a number of things by rote. No way around it. In physics and maths, when you know the (limited) amount of formulas which apply and at least half-way remember the way to apply them then you usually can at least pass.
But in chemistry? If you don't remember whether this particular substituent is meso- or para-/ortho-directing when sitting on a benzene molecule, you're basically SOL.
For one organic chemistry exam I had about 200 cue cards with various reactions, common names (along with their IUPAC names) and other assorted details.
-
@Rhywden said in But that's cheating!:
Yeah, chemistry is one of those subjects where you simply are forced to learn quite a number of things by rote. No way around it.
I did enjoy learning about how it was all applied quantum mechanics, with the shapes of atoms in molecules being determined by 3D solutions of the wave equation. It set all that complexity on a common sound footing. Yes there's a lot of bits and pieces, but that's because the underlying physics has a great many configurations with different stable and metastable energy levels. But it's a bit beyond high school chemistry…
What I hated was calculating reaction rates by hand. (I was also a terrible lab chemist.)
-
@dkf said in But that's cheating!:
I was also a terrible lab chemist.
I loved labs. Mostly. Except one thing about qual analysis. I always had enough Na contamination from glassware, etc., that I thought my unknown sample included Na; it never did. And the one time as a student lab tech I had to prep a biochem (I think) lab; the solutions formed so much foam that they were almost impossible to measure accurately.
-
@HardwareGeek said in But that's cheating!:
I had a math teacher who didn't grade homework at all
This is the norm in the Netherlands (or, at least, it was several decades ago): some teachers might check if you did your homework, but you never got grades for it. However, you might get an unannounced written test at any time, depending on the teacher’s ideas (and probably mood), based on the homework you were supposed to have done for that day.
@Benjamin-Hall said in But that's cheating!:
once I got past the parts where I needed to actually do numbers and everything was symbolic, I was fine.
Heh, other way round for me. The more abstract things get, the less I can make heads or tails of them. Unless it actually interests me, I usually just give up on it altogether as pointless.
I only realised, long after dropping out of college, that the school system here just doesn’t work well for teaching me things. The teachers often couldn’t hold my attention, the material we were supposed to be learning was usually not as interesting as the stuff we weren’t elsewhere in the textbook (or around the classroom), you were expected to memorise pointless stuff, etc. etc. As a result, pretty much everything I can do or know, beyond basic levels, I taught myself at some point, purely because it interest{s|ed} me.
So yeah, I can see @Mason_Wheeler’s point, though I do think that there is at least a certain amount of knowledge that you need to actually have about any given subject in order to see the forest instead of the trees. Once you have that, you can usually just look up what you don’t immediately know.
-
@HardwareGeek said in But that's cheating!:
@dkf said in But that's cheating!:
I was also a terrible lab chemist.
I loved labs. Mostly. Except one thing about qual analysis. I always had enough Na contamination from glassware, etc., that I thought my unknown sample included Na; it never did. And the one time as a student lab tech I had to prep a biochem (I think) lab; the solutions formed so much foam that they were almost impossible to measure accurately.
Fun fact: If you do not manage to remove all the water from your sample through vacuum evaporation, you won't have much fun with your 1H-NMR analysis.
-
@Rhywden I'll take your word for that; I never actually took biochem myself. I don't remember what the lab prep was, but whatever it was, it was something really simple like, Dissolve X g of $thing in Y ml of water and dilute to Z ml, or something; really basic that I didn't need to know anything about biochem. Only once or twice that I had to prep something for a class beyond what I had taken or was currently taking; I mostly prepped labs for the Intro to Chem or beginning General Chem classes.
-
@HardwareGeek Well, it's similar to your Na-problem. NMR (most common: 1H and 13C) basically sweeps the sample inside a very strong static magnetic field with radio waves at frequencies the isotopes resonate at (Hence the name: Nucleo-Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy). Okay, sweeping is the old method, nowadays you simply pulse the sample with all interesting frequencies at once and let Fourier figure it out.
Depending on the location of the isotope and its immediate neighbours, it will resonate at a different frequency, you usually include a reference sample with only one resonance frequency ( (CH3)4Si IIRC) and all other responses are expressed relative to that one. So, the 4 hydrogen atoms in CH4 will respond at only one frequency (because all 4 are indistinguishable) whereas something like H3C-CH2-CH3 will have two resonance frequencies - one for the 2*3 hydrogen atoms at the "end" and one for the 2 hydrogens in the "middle". The strength of the response also corresponds to the number of chemically equivalent isotopes.
So you get a response of 6 at 2δ and a response of 2 at 2.1δ and thus can figure out the structure of the molecule (with 1δ being the resonance frequency of the reference sample).
That's the basic mechanic of how NMR works.
Now, if you manage to include a lot of water (i.e. H2O) in your sample, the response by the "water hydrogen" will simply drown out anything else you want to measure.
-
@Rhywden I never did nmr, but xrf (x-ray resonance fluoroscopy) has a similar issue. Except with the heavier metals, especially lead. Any lead on the sample will drown out anything else because it's got spectral lines everywhere, and bright ones.
