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Comment by klysm | Hacker News Reader

> So I set off on a journey that would lower my GPA and occasionally leave me questioning my sanity

Amazing! Sacrificing GPA for projects is always a good time

I really liked the old German university concept, the one before we just took over Bachelor/Master.

Throughout my CS studies, I was just collecting "tickets" (very hard to translate the actual word, "Schein"), which basically just attested that you have passed a course. They (often) had a grade on it, but it did not matter. Instead, once in the middle ("pre-diploma") and once at the very end of your time at university, you'd have oral exams. And those determined your grade. To attend them, you needed the right combination of "tickets".

The glaring downside of this system is that if you had a bad time in those few months of your very final exams, you could screw up your entire grade.

The upside of it, is that I was free (and encouraged) to pursue whatever I wanted, without each course risking to have an effect on my "GPA". I had way more tickets than I needed in the end, and still time and energy to pursue whatever else I wanted (playing with microcontrollers etc.).

I had a couple of classes in USA uni that worked quite similarly. The professor said we can take the quizzes if we want, and if we didn't then the later quizzes would constitute more of your grade. The ultimate play was to only take the final quiz.

> The ultimate play was to only take the final quiz.

This is how a lot of British undergrad courses ('modules') work. One giant exam at the very end determining everything; no quizzes, no problem sheets, no midterms.

Modules? We just had six massive exams at the end of three years!

Chicago used to be that way in the long ago times.

Would not be a surprise if AI brought this back.

> Throughout my CS studies, I was just collecting "tickets" (very hard to translate the actual word, "Schein"), which basically just attested that you have passed a course. They (often) had a grade on it, but it did not matter. Instead, once in the middle ("pre-diploma") and once at the very end of your time at university, you'd have oral exams. And those determined your grade. To attend them, you needed the right combination of "tickets".

What you are describing was one of the systems they used.

So at my university (OvG in Magdeburg) they used this system for math, but computer science had written exams.

As a teacher once told me.

"Never let school limit your education"

I learned a ton while at my university. Much of it was outside of my classwork.

For those wondering this is a common paraphrase of Grant Allen and Mark Twain. Here we say "Never let school get in the way of a good education."

Agreed. My GPA suffered significantly in 1999 when I was writing a web service to help me calculate Pi, but it was absolutely worth it.

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