> Homework should be optional material for self study

At Caltech, homework was assigned but had no bearing on your grade. The grades were based on the midterm and final exams.

But not mastering the homework usually resulted in flunking the exams. There were "retch" sessions after each homework assignment that was staffed by a grad student, and the purpose was to help the students understand the homework problems. I knew only one person (Hal Finney) who was so smart he didn't need to do the homework.

I learned the hard way that the path to success was:

1. never miss a lecture, no matter what

2. take notes by hand during lecture

3. do the homework on time, and make sure you understand every problem. Take advantage of the retch sessions.

And that worked for me.

Unlimited retakes would be an enormous amount of work for professors/TAs/teachers.

Optional homework is often a disaster. At best, students would do it right before an exam and the goal of education is not to just pass exams. They’d probably still get a lower score than if they did the homework when they were supposed to.

What I think is better is to have a due date, but just make the maximum 10% each day it is late. So after 2 days, the highest score you could receive would be 80%.

I liked that system because it gave some flexibility with deadlines while still encouraging you to turn things in on time.

What you described about exams is like how I approach most certification exams: go through a test bank of questions until I get 80% then take the real test.

The study was done in China, where making the class easier to improve pass rates isn't really a thing, as the Gaokao operates more like a stack ranking where it doesn't matter much how well you did in an absolute sense, only that not too many others who did better than you are competing for the same spot. Unlimited retakes are possible in theory, except each costs you a year of your life and except for some extreme cases of repeat test-takers, most people are going to give up after just one or two bad results. Homework is definitely not optional, but going home from school is. (Due to the hukou system, children often have to go to school far from where their parents work, so boarding schools with teacher-supervised self-study are common.) I don't see how holding back for individual classes is supposed to work considering scheduling conflicts.

> F students will realize they have to study, start actually learning and then pass on the second time

Do you have evidence for this beyond your friends (who were accepted into college)?

It's all cute but naively glances over what this all boils to - competition.

Education system, contrary to popular belief/name, isn't tailored to educate but to select winners and losers which then will be picked on the job market.

That's why it seems absurd when you think about it as an institution that aims to educate. That's because that isn't the real purpose of it. The purpose is to stratify and classify early.

Schools do not operate in a vacuum; they serve as credentialing gatekeepers for a hyper-competitive capitalist job market. If everyone could easily retake exams until they got an A, grades would lose their primary utility for employers and universities: differentiation. Society relies on schools to provide a neat hierarchy of candidates that for one reason or another thrived in difficult environment of adolescent schooling.

The system often prioritizes compliance, endurance of boredom, and social maneuvering over actual critical thinking precisely because those traits align with corporate hierarchies.

> If you try and force kids to study when they don't want to "for their own good" you're not actually helping them. Everyone needs to find their own path. Let people fail.

this rhetoric is pretending to be an alternative to coercion. IMO the ideas you are talking about are well trodden and are still coercion nonetheless.