I accidentally discovered how to finish an entire course in a weekend.
An MIT PhD candidate explained why he studies backwards.
Most students open the syllabus on day one and start grinding through readings in the order the professor assigned them.
He does the exact opposite.
He uploads every lecture, every reading, every problem set for the entire course into NotebookLM before he reads a single page.
Then he runs one prompt:
"If I had to teach this entire course to a room of smart undergrads in 90 minutes, what are the 7 concepts I absolutely cannot skip, and why?"
NotebookLM spits out the 7 load-bearing ideas. The ones the entire course is secretly built around. Everything else is scaffolding.
Then he only studies those 7.
Not the assigned readings. Not the optional ones. Not the 400-page textbook the professor pretends everyone will finish.
Just the 7 concepts that the course itself admits are the actual skeleton.
His second prompt is where it gets brutal.
"For each of these 7 concepts, generate the hardest possible exam question a professor could write, and show me what a perfect answer looks like."
He spends the next few days solving those questions cold. No notes. No shortcuts.
Every time he gets one wrong, he runs one more prompt: "Explain what I'm missing and what foundational idea I skipped."
By the time the actual exam hits, it's the fourth time he's seen a version of every question on it.
He's been at the top of every class for 4 years. Classmates think he's a genius.
He's not smarter than them. He just figured out that most courses contain maybe 10% signal and 90% noise, and the professor will never tell you which is which.
NotebookLM will.
The rest of the class is still reading chapter 3.
He already knows what's on the final.