Thread by @AnthonyLeeZhang

There is a surprisingly simple "hack" to doing well in college classes, even fairly hard ones. Say you want to do well in intermediate physics, chemistry, math, etc. Just find every textbook written about your subject, read and do/figure out the answers to all the questions

This works in my experience because it's pretty rare for faculty to come up with test questions literally out of nowhere: often they're taken from other books. Even if they are "new" someone's often come up with the same thing before and it's in a book somewhere

There are realistically only so many good test questions one can ask about intermediate physics, and it's entirely possible (though tedious) to get through most of them

IMO, this is also nontrivial advice, because I find students tend to be fairly unwilling to use textbooks other than the one they're assigned. I think one actually learns more in general from reading more textbooks, than reading one really closely. Up to a point of course

Classes and tests are of course generally mostly a massive waste of time, and I hope you are never in a situation where it is super important to you to get like 99% on a test - but if you ever are...

Another underappreciated thing is that some textbooks are better at explaining some things. So spending less time on more books, you get to "lean" towards the explanations that make more sense to you. Ppl tend to get stuck on books and blame themselves

https://twitter.com/m4h007/status/1407445184892215296

Often it's not that you are bad, it is just that the book actually did a poor or lazy job on explaining something, and another book may de a much better job

Also note that this is ultimately kind of unproductive in most cases, because much of what you are really learning is "test tricks" rather than content. Kind of like math olympiad prep. But again, if for some reason it's needed...

https://twitter.com/AnthonyLeeZhang/status/1407453941298831373

And another point, this doesn't actually take 5x the time, maybe something like 2x for 5 books, because you've seen most of the stuff, and you can skip the common parts only focus on the new/different pieces

https://twitter.com/AnthonyLeeZhang/status/1407452382766764032

Another good point is that this "hack" really exploits the "artificiality" of classes, that they really test you on a set of known things. Which is very different from pushing the boundaries of knowledge/creating anything new

https://twitter.com/edwardhkennedy/status/1407456198627102721

The thread's meant very much in the spirit of this from @arpitrage, where someone just pre-prepares whole responses to essentially every possible Cambridge essay question, turning an unstructured-prompt-question into a recall-question

https://twitter.com/arpitrage/status/1407443515634860036

Also a "hack" by my definitions, in the sense that it addresses well a test format in a manner very different from the way the test format was "intended" to be addressed. Also probably largely a waste of time grand-scheme-of-things. But hey, it's possible!