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Comment by potatoman22 | Hacker News Reader

Ehh, you could come close to condensing 1-2 college courses into 4 weeks. It wouldn't be fun though.

There’s decent science on why this isn’t possible. Basically you need to space things out to give the brain time to work out what to put into long term memory

It's possible, but for very few people. I went to MIT and there were stories of people there taking ~12-16 classes a semester which theoretically averages out to a course a week (though they ran concurrently and it's a crazy course load for the average person). To be fair, the people who could do that were way on the right of the distribution and it's hard to convey just how fast they could pick things up (think of them as the equivalent of an NBA player vs the average MIT student as a D1 athlete).

I react well to that approach if I'm really excited about the material, and usually do well in the coursework. It does take a few months for everything to "really" sink in though, and having a lot of friends or acquaintances from MIT and Stanford that did that I think it's rather the norm.

Approving coursework doesn't mean that the concepts sunk in. It just means you have new tools to further your understanding of everything, but it still takes a long time for it to sink in. During that time maybe you just need to do nothing, just let it sink in, but in my experience everyone ends up needing some time.

They don't allow that at MIT anymore. Anyway, I have a feeling those stories got exaggerated over time.

You simply can't take 12-16 classes a semester, the day doesn't have enough hours for that. They _might_ have gotten permission from the professors to skip classes and just show up to the exams, which is _not_ learning.

Not sure why that's not learning - if they understand the material at the time of the exams, who cares if they show up to class? Most people forget most of the stuff they "learned" in college 10 years out anyway - most of the economic worth is in the credentialing / signaling versus the actual education (since getting into the school is the hardest part)

I meant that it is not learning in the context of the discussion, which was whether people can assimilate that amount of information in a semester. If you show up to the exam and pass then you did all the learning prior to that.

I don't think I could retain the information if it was that compressed, either.

Depends. Mathematics? Chemistry? There's some room for compression there, but not much. If you ditched all of the absolutely useless "general education"[1] classes, and kept class sizes small enough to allow time for individual coaching, I think most STEM undergraduate degrees could fit nicely within two to three years.

[1] Students are welcome to "expand their horizons" when they aren't paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of being forced to do so.

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