This was also my observation but in the reverse direction. I turned down a place at Cambridge to do my undergrad at Edinburgh a few years ago (for various reasons, not relevant here). It was only the top n% of students in the cohort who'd turn up for tutorials (prepared, or indeed at all), do assignments without cheating, ask questions in lectures, etc. Getting high grades in exams was mostly a memorization game. There was a really high workload but that was more due to busywork than intellectual challenge.
Some counties in England still have state grammar schools and still follow the 11+ process. The 163 that the poster above you is referring to are state, selective, schools, rather than private grammar schools. There's a list linked in the Wikipedia page you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...
My first job out of college was like this. My manager knew I had no work and had no particular interest in letting me take on anything I proposed or found. I ended up quitting a few months in because (on top of a few other issues) I found it way too soul-destroying to have nothing to do.
Same situation for me (albeit left the job at the end of the contract, not laid off). I’ve had the laptop for over a year now because IT refused to pay return shipping. I’ve followed up a few times and been told it’ll be sorted, but never hear back…
Yeah, I wish I'd had "free time" in college. 60-70 hour work weeks were normal - 20 hours a week in class and then a full-time load of courseworks / readings / labs etc. I couldn't afford to take time off on weekends for the first 3.5 years. It was horrendous.
Once I started full-time work it was like a revelation - finally I don't have to work on evenings and weekends! I actually get free time to myself! I can have hobbies!
CSV import (from Excel / Google Sheets) is my go-to for this as well. Added bonus is being able to script things - I have some Python scripts that will do a lot of the hard work for me when making cards for a new language (looking up definitions and example sentences from Wiktionary, adding synonyms / antonyms, etc).
I've put them in a Gist for you: https://gist.github.com/andmikey/4da65e0085104e514286678c431.... The script I run is wiktionary_scraper.py, it assumes you've got a vocab_main.xlsx that contains a "lookup" sheet with the first column being all the words you want to look up. Definitions and related words are put into a new file, vocab_defns.xlsx.
I will warn you - it's not very clean code and mostly based on scripts I'd found on GitHub. It's something I threw together over a summer because I needed to learn a lot of Swedish words very quickly, and my usual Anki-adding methods were too slow. Worked out well, but I do keep meaning to come back to it and make it a proper bit of software...
One way you can achieve this using SRS is forcing very short recall times. I average under 2 seconds a card in review: my view is that if I can't recall it in under 2 seconds (what would be realistic in a real-life scenario when speaking a language) then I don't know it. It's a method that's trained me to be very fast at recalling words when needed.
Yeah, it's something I can time myself: I'm on about 6 years of daily usage at this point so it comes very easily. Anki also lets you set a time-out on cards as well. I'll know just from looking at the front of the card whether or not I know the word. If I do, space then 'good'; if I don't, space then 'again'. Very rarely I'll know a card but only after a longer moment to think about it - that's a 'hard' card.
I’ve just graduated in Computer Science and I’m trying this pivot as well, but without the b-school (yet). ~2 years of tech work experience during my degree and I realised tech just doesn’t work for me right now. Starting in a much more generalist business role soon where it’s really helpful to have tech knowledge. Glad to know it’s worked out for you :)
Good luck. For me it was good to get at least a few yrs of tech experience before pivoting. it definitely was helpful later, some for the technical experience and maybe more for understanding the dynamics of how decisions get made by technical teams (including how politics comes into play). When you are part of the "business" that is the "customer" of the technical team, that experience can give you huge value that your peers may not be able to offer.
UK unis are a lot better at using the full grading scale, in my experience. 70% gets you a 'first class' [0], but there's a lot of room in the 70-100 range to differentiate performance. It was a nice system because there's almost always space for able students to really push the boundary. The idea is that getting >80% is for students doing really exceptional / original work.
[0] A "1st" (A) is between 70-100%, "2:1" (B) is 60-69%, "2:2" (C) is 50-59%, and "3rd" (D, lowest passing grade) is 40-49%. UK degrees are awarded one final grade at the end, rather than a GPA, usually based on your last two years of study only.
Not sure how long ago this was - photos on resumes is definitely not a thing in the UK anymore. Very common in some European countries (e.g. Germany), though.
