Mastery or Mark Sheets

My husband is doing his Executive Data Science at IISc, Bangalore now. 

A little background…. I fell in love with him looking at his code and he keeps telling me I fell in love for all the wrong reasons 🤓 but the code was crisp, concise, memory efficient and to the point. He built market making systems for all the amazing investment banks all his life. When he wanted to pick entrepreneurship, he didn’t wink his eye to wonder what he wants to do. He just said, I love math. I love code and I can do this all day long. That is all he is doing now. As a trader he wants to build his decision making systems with quantitative finance and raw models. APIs do not cut it. I was intrigued by why he wants to learn from only IISc and I got my answer slowly. 

I watch him from the side lines, listen to his lectures on the fly, give him coffees when the screen is full of equations 🤪. The best part of all this is, I am more excited about his exams than he is as the questions papers are brutal and all exams are open book. Forget open book, it is open internet. These boys and girls in the class struggle to figure things out as the questions are thought provoking. If you copy paste the question in Chat GPT, it takes the GPT for a spin. I don't know how much computing power these things consume. 

I have secretly fallen in love with all these super star profs who knew how to teach for mastery and not for mark sheets. They knew how to make the brains work for their students. They give a multiple choice question and say choose all the right answers and it is not like our IIT JEE exams where the answers are 1.63, 0.63, 1.60 types. It is 1.63, 2.74, 8.97 types. Means when you use different approaches, you get different answers. So you can't even use elimination as a criteria. You must know all the approaches to answer the question correctly.

True or False questions needs the answer obviously but most importantly, the students must justify why it is true or false. They get a zero without justification. The open internet exam makes the exam even harder and that is the awesome part. That is learning for mastery. 

Marksheets and Grades are ego boosters or killers but mastery keeps you curious, alive, awake and striving. That is what learning is all about. In Maker's Guild, we promote learning because people want to learn and not because there is an external reward or motivation or badge. They learn purely because they have an intent to learn and master the topic in that sprint. That is how learning should be. That is what our learning club is all about. We renamed all our clubs with the gerund ("ing") so that it accurately implies that we keep doing it day in and day out.

Join the club, if you want to make yourselves better. Your fee is your betterment. That would do.

It is a safe space, so no questions are stupid/silly. It is a driven community so it keeps you ON at all times.

🥂 to mastery!