link to Part I: Knowing the Subject
link to Part II: Out Playing the Professor
No student shall knowingly procure, provide, or accept any unauthorized material that contains questions or answers to any examination or assignment to be given at a subsequent time.
No student shall complete, in part or in total, any examination or assignment for another person.
No student shall knowingly allow any examination or assignment to be completed, in part or in total, for himself or herself by another person.
No student shall plagiarize or copy the work of another person and submit it as his or her own work.
No student shall employ aids excluded by the instructor in undertaking course work or in completing any exam or assignment.
No student shall alter graded class assignments or examinations and then resubmit them for regrading.
No student shall submit substantially the same material in more than one course without prior authorization.

Academics is a game of intellectual acuity. Academic ingenuity is when you outplay the game.

Academic ingenuity occurs on 3 fronts:
1. knowing the subject
2. out playing the professor
3. beating the field

Beating the field
Now if you are in a pre-med type class, tough luck. There really is not a solution to beating the field than outstudying and outperforming your fellow students. If the previous two aspects of academic ingenuity are not of much help, this last one won’t be either.

Academics competition is like a golf tournament in that all scores are relative. You rarely see a tournament where champions win by scoring below a set number of strokes. The cut line dividing the players who continue past the preliminary rounds and those who get sent home is a fluid line. Imagine if a tournament said “only players that score below 80 can make it to the next day” only to have an incredibly windy day. The competition may only be wittled down to 3 players the next day, the tournament would be a complete dud.

The explanation is highly enhanced in young professors and assistant professors. Once again, knowing the professor helps beat the field. A professor cannot fail everyone in class, this is for certain. If everyone in his/her class flunks, it reflects horribly on the professor. Exams are a gauge of both how well students understand the concepts and how well a teacher performs in the classroom. Imagine a professor reporting to the department “I am an amazing teacher, but all my students failed my class”. You won’t find that professor teaching very long at that university. Inevitably every professor has a range of students that need to do well in the class for the professor’s sake.

Universities are businesses. They sell students an education by proclaiming how high the average GPA is or how many of their students go on to bigger, better things. A bell curve like the one depicted below, with the class mean ~50% would be an eye sore and a blow to a university’s PR.

Academic institutions would never allow a whole class to fail. 

Professors typically have a good grasp of how grades shape up and therefore are confident in their ability to change a few questions on a test to get the grade distribution they require. Therefore most grades are not curved for each midterm, but if you keep the overall shape of the class in mind you will know more precisely what kind of effort you need to exercise for a given test. A good rule of thumb is to always, always over study for the first midterm. In a class where there are two midterms this piece of advice is advantageous to you in both the following scenarios:
1. The test is easy and you do well, but so does everyone else. No harm done and you’re right in the thick of the race with everyone else.
2. The rest of the class does extremely poorly and you score above the mean. Most professors compensate by issueing an easier second midterm or final, this is where you can relax a little bit since you know generally everyone will do better and you can ride the wave.

Having the presence of mind to understand where you stand relative to the curve helps in managing your time and resources. When finals rolls around always review where you stand in each class and which classes to push and which classes to retreat your effors. It is unwise to tackle each final with same zeal and voraciousness.

Beating the field requires some insight in how you choose classes. The general breakdown of each class goes like this:
10% Homework/Discussion
40-60% Midterms
30-40% Final

If it is apparent that finals are so crucial to the overall grade, it is logical then to have the best finals schedule possible. Most universities have an pre-set finals schedule such that if your classes are a certain time on MWF or Tu/Thur the finals for that class will correspond to a given day and time during the finals schedule. All this is available information prior to even signing up for the class. Example finals schedules: UCSD UCLA.

Course planning is just as important to securing a good grade as doing well on tests. Avoid difficult professors and take that class that will have a final on Friday when your other three are M, Tu, Wed even if it’s a night class at 7:30pm. You’ll suffer for 10-15 weeks but how much more painful is it to see your entire quarter’s efforts spiraling down the drain from a horrible finals schedule. With tuition ranging anywhere from $12 – 53K a year and rising, do you really want to take that chance with your grade? 

Schedule A

Schedule B

which of these schedules would be easier to study for?

While on the topic of tuition, there is a growing trend of students of students finishing 4 year programs in 3 years. The financial benefits of this mindset is staggering and with certain majors is significantly easier to do than others. If you have desire to achieve this it requires discipline and an intimate knowledge of your department requirements for your major and college graduation requirements, but that’s a whole new series.

A final word. Careers can end in college before they’re even started. Don’t cheat. It never pays.

link to Part I: Knowing the Subject

No student shall knowingly procure, provide, or accept any unauthorized material that contains questions or answers to any examination or assignment to be given at a subsequent time.
No student shall complete, in part or in total, any examination or assignment for another person.
No student shall knowingly allow any examination or assignment to be completed, in part or in total, for himself or herself by another person.
No student shall plagiarize or copy the work of another person and submit it as his or her own work.
No student shall employ aids excluded by the instructor in undertaking course work or in completing any exam or assignment.
No student shall alter graded class assignments or examinations and then resubmit them for regrading.
No student shall submit substantially the same material in more than one course without prior authorization. 

Academics is a game of intellectual acuity. Academic ingenuity is when you outplay the game.

Academic ingenuity occurs on 3 fronts:
1. knowing the subject
2. out playing the professor
3. beating the field

Part II: Out playing the Professor:

When Matt Damon sat down at the card table in the movie, Rounders, he knew the game was more than just the cards, it was also about being able to read the people at the table. In the same way, a student should not only learn the material but also read the professor.

It is a sad reality that most professors at academic institutions have teaching quite low on their list of priorities but for an understandable reason. Promotion and raises have to do with academic research accomplishments, not teaching ability. The difference between a tenured professor and an assistant professor is typically dependent on the quality and quantity of published articles his or her lab can produce, not how many outstanding students he or she nurtures.

The difference in motive between students and professors is staggering. As a result, course material gets recycled over and over again. In the first post, you’ll find that at the bottom of the website lies this line:  Materials from my class last year are available here. Most of the materials are the same or similar, but some topics will be covered in a different order or changed in emphasis. 

Take for example Mechanical Engineering as another case study. If you are a ME student at UCSD you have undoubtedly seen this website before: maecourses.ucsd.edu. It is a compilation of courses offered over the last two years. Let’s take MAE143B offered in spring 2010 for example. A professor leaves his course website online and it contains homework assignments, solutions, midterms and finals, and various other resources.

Now if I were a ME student and knew that I would be taking MAE143B sometime down the line, I would save everything on this website for future reference. Within departments professors know one another an the likelihood of professors sharing teaching notes are quite high. Take MAE3 for example. Prof. Nathan Delson has taught MAE3 for a long time and as long as he is at UCSD that class will be his to teach. He doesn’t vary the material much quarter to quarter and everything is online: http://www.maelabs.ucsd.edu/mae3/index.htm

One great way to get a read on your professor is via ratemyprofessor.com (click here for UCSD). Not every professor is going to be on there but many are. We’ll find the reviews on Prof. Delson and you get an idea that the course is pretty intensive, so factor that in when scheduling courses! (review)

A student heading into this next year will have a full quarter’s scouting report on what kind of course load to expect and most importantly, what the professor thinks is important (evident in what he tests in past midterms/finals). Professors do not change styles from one course to the next. The teaching style remains the same and only the subject matter changes. Once you are familiar with a specific professor, try to take as many courses with him as possible. If you hear a professor is really tough, it’s simple: avoid that professor like the plague.

Often times, a professor has his own dedicated website and you will find all his previous courses on there. For example, in spring 2009 a Professor Miroslav Krstic was the professor for MAE143A and his course website was: http://flyingv.ucsd.edu/krstic/teaching/143a/143a.html. A quick deletion of the end of the address reveals all the courses this professor also teaches MAE 143B (http://flyingv.ucsd.edu/krstic/teaching/).

Ingenuity requires discipline. A quick creative search of your future classes can yield many resources that put you way ahead of your competition.

Another reality is that people who are part of a community usually score better results. Sure having a study buddy helps and sharing resources help. The real reason is that knowing students who are older than you always help give you insight into a professor’s teaching style.

ie. Professor Keller (alias) is a professor in the BENG dept who always provides more questions on a test than a student could finish in an allotted time. It does not matter that students can’t finish the test because he eventually curves the class grades at the end anyways. Without knowing this, many students spend a little too long on the first few problems and find themselves having no time to finish the 9th or 10th question in the exam, often leaving them entirely blank. The most basic equations would have yielded some points on a question, even if there was not enough time to properly finish the questions. Knowing this, the key to this professor was blitzing through the test a first time and jotting down every equation related to the questions. Then tackling the solvable ones first before moving on to the tricky questions.

Students who were aware of Prof. Keller’s techniques did fairly well in the class. Others who did not were clearly flustered and served the lower end of the curve.

Whether you are in a fraternity, sorority, fellowship, or society, get to know the students who are older than you in your major. They can provide a wealth of information and sometimes an old exam or two. I have seen peers of mine who still have boxes of their old academic stuff. Old physics and chemistry notebooks, old exams and lectures. It’s a great feeling when you can go into a class fully confident that you know exactly what your professor holds in his bag of tricks.

As the old hustle adage goes, “If you can’t win at 5 card stud holding 7 cards, you don’t belong at the table.”

Next: Beating the field