Foundations

“Do we need to know this for the test, Professor?”

“Nah, I barely remember them!”

Experiment Public Relations

“There weren’t any difficult aspects?”

“Nope, everything was amazing!”

Excited

This might sound like a rare problem, but it happens more than you might think. In particular, I see it when professors start rattling off long theorems that they know by heart.

Obscure

“My field is so niche that even the search engines have no idea what I’m typing in!”

Thermodynamic Relations

“I should be able to turn this into some kind of machine learning algorithm.”

Sets

“I really shouldn’t have given you that book on set theory…”

Process

Changing your perspective from one of “getting good grades” to one of “understanding concepts deeply” is probably the best thing you can do for your education.

Recall

“I’m sure you all remember how to prove this result.”

Pseudowork

I can kind of understand why people do this, but really, it’s not the work you should be spending your precious time on.

Probabilistic Multiple Choice

It’s amazing the amount of “bad” answers you can eliminate just by using the fact that your teacher is making a test.