“Gaming” college without actually cheating. Your top 3!

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#2 reminds me of character design and looking at character silhouettes.

#3 is kinda auto for me. Minus the rewriting.

- It's the same principle I suppose, being able to tell what a design is in monochrome / silhouette form / broken down to the simplest form.

- My notes were an absolute mess before I'd rewrite them. There was a mix of keywords, hastily drawn flowcharts and some rather odd doodles in there, such as a baby carrier on the roof of a radio station building. However, my doodles were usually at least tangentially related to the subject. I believe the baby was when were learning about active VS passive audiences, there was discussion over bias in the media and I started thinking about the phrase "The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world" and I suppose the news / radio station was the metaphorical mother in this scenario, having influence over a passive audience (in this case, the baby) and doing the baby injustice by not properly caring for them (misinformation growing up, which later leaves them out in the cold / out of the know). Which, granted is a stretch, but sums up how my mind works.

Some more straightforward examples would be drawing a cat when discussing animal photography (I was mainly just bored in that case) and drawing the inside of a beehive when attending a lecture on architecture photography since beehives created by beekeepers are rather structured and geometrical and they make me think of some modern designs in architecture. However, there were times where the doodles were just random and nothing to do with the work, such as when I drew a flower with a dozen eyes on the petals. I probably should've brought my laptop with me more often to take notes, I would've been less tempted to doodle.

However, sometimes it was useful to have my notebook with me, such as when I had to come up with an idea for a board game then proceed to market it to the class and a couple of times where I had to invent ideas for apps. Having the notebook gave me space to quickly sketch some ideas to have in front of me before they asked what I had in mind.

Might this be similar to knowing chords and chord progression in guitar?

Myself, I just dabble in guitar, but I do appreciate really skillful playing.

I never tried practicing any music instruments yet. Counting rhymes, maybe.

But it certainly transferred in typewriting in computer keyboards.



Also I'm out of practice. In handwriting. For the second time. Perhaps typing with keyboards too.

Someone said that a premed student purposely gave the wrong answer to the homework, to a classmate, to copy

Tertiary education is an entirely different ballpark to primary and secondary. In those two, you're expected to follow orders, to stay in your lane, to learn at the same clockwork rate as everyone else. In tertiary, while the courses still follow the same clockwork chunking, the shackles are pretty much off when it comes to what else you can do. It's just that the majority of people, having spent over a decade in the previous straitjacket of a system, keep acting as if this is more of the same. And of course they're never told that they have a lot more freedom.

So:

Read ahead in your books. Read ALL the book. Read other books associated with the course, and with the topic in general. Pillage the education libraries.

Talk to people who took your unit/course in the last 12 months. Age is not the same social restriction at university as it is in school. There are people there your age, people there who are going back to tertiary after decades in the workforce, advanced students younger than you, and people your age who took your specific unit last year or last semester. Talk to all of them. Ask what's coming up. Ask if they have notes, or what resources they found were most useful. Ask what twists the unit threw at them, which faculty were the most and least helpful. If you can find people from the last couple of years, ask them about projects - while units might not repeat an exact project from year to year, often they recycle them every few years, or at least recycle the basic concept.

Get in touch with people who are taking (or did take) the unit in other colleges/universities. Education is fairly standardized, particularly when it comes to undergraduate units, and a wider variety of viewpoints and experience can only help.

If there are local interest groups which are outside the learning institution, and which are of a general theme with the unit/course, join them and talk to the members. Some of them may have taken similar courses; sometimes even from the same place you're studying at. Others may have insight into or experience in other areas of the field or industry, which can help round out your understanding of how the unit ties into the real world.

Overall, do not have the mindset that the unit is the core 90% (or 100%) of the education. Assume that you are personally taking your education in hand rather than leaving it up to the educational institution, and *one* of the things you are doing when it comes to that subject is taking that unit, but you are also doing a number of other things to complement it.