How we hacked business school

Published on August 16, 2025 3:22 PM GMTReverse-engineering what really counts as “smart” I: The game In business undergrad, a third of your grades was based on in-class participation, which was scored across five tiers:-1: You literally said something sexist.0: No contribution.1: A “case fact;” surfacing a relevant detail from the reading.2: An analysis; some work required to get to a fact.3: An insight; something really smart.By the final semester, it was more interesting to try maximizing contribution grades while minimizing case reading. And because the fuzzy boundary between 2-to-3 felt more like a “you know it when you see it,” we spent that semester reverse-engineering past top contributions we’d seen.That semester, in a grading system curved tightly around an 80-82, our average contribution grades across 10 courses combined was above 92 (roughly +2 standard deviations above average).Importantly, the effort we input did not change, only the strategy. Instead of preparing for class, we tracked along with class discussion and made points opportunistically. Our contributions improved while somehow doing less work than before.We first identified at least three common types of Level 3 contributions:Expertise: Somebody volunteers ‘proprietary’ knowledge from their work or life to explain how something works, or they surface considerations not mentioned in the reading.“At my internship, 80% of my learning was through osmosis, and I would have been less likely to return if it was all-virtual, which this case hasn’t considered.”Deductions: Revealing that if an idea is implemented, it may have indirect consequences, so we should either choose another option, or generate some mitigations.“Switching to remote reduces office overhead, but it’ll weaken onboarding, which increases ramp time, which slows growth; which was the firm’s top priority.”Implication: Showing that an idea should actionably lead the case decisionmaker to one of the potential options.“We can still go remote to save money; we’d just have to implement any low-cost mitigations within our control, for example, structured mentorship layers.”The common thread: each required doing a piece of invisible work that no one else had done yet. II: Unit of Work Effective contributions require some work to achieve, but not because effort is intrinsically useful. Calculating an irrelevant financial ratio can get scored as a 1, or even a 0.Instead, work is incidentally useful because of a selection effect: If the contribution was valuable and the answer was obvious, everyone would have known it already -- being valuable and new means an obstacle had blocked people’s knowledge of it.A unit of work is defined as the abstract quantity equal to ‘whatever it takes’ to overcome that obstacle, and bring new knowledge to the audience.Expertise requires work: not just in the moment, but earlier; and then in identifying if your fact is calibrated to aid a classmate’s understanding.Deductions are a unit of work: modeling Nth-order-effects that others didn’t have the intuition to recognize.Implications are a unit of work: converting facts into prescriptions by matching decisionmaking levers to goals.After recognizing this pattern, you can shed the particular “contribution types,” and focus on the unit of work generally.Any analysis can be insightful if it unblocks a conceptual phase shift from Understanding A → Understanding B.Noticing a connection between disparate concepts; identifying two different observations as instances of the same thing; realizing you can question a taken-for-granted assumption; can all be units of work.And the most thoroughly ‘blocked’ understandings aren’t the facts you had no clue about, but the facts you thought you already knew. The most Herculean units of work don’t guide you from A → B but swing you from A → Opposite-of-A.Critically, class contributions were not graded proportional to their labor, but to the magnitude of the conceptual phase shift they induced.For this reason, you could often tell a comment was a “Level 3” the moment it landed: it produced an epiphany.That’s why calculating Operations or Marketing math to arrive at a number, while still ‘work,’ wasn’t an ‘insight,’ because the outcome isn’t of a fundamentally different sort than what you expect.Centering ‘insights’ or ‘conceptual phase shifts’ in your contributions can cloak you in the guise of expertise, even when you have little. III: Modeling Expertise The most common Level 3 contribution was ‘expertise.’ But because students tend to have so little of their own, it usually took the form of “proprietary” knowledge they inherited from elsewhere in their life, like processes codified at their internships. This worked for at least two reasons:First, the “contact with reality” from real-world experience selects for empirically tested explanations, and pragmatically feasible solutions.Since most students lacked the experience to have generated their own knowledge, their insightful contributions were trojan horses: smuggling in ideas borrowed from others’ hard-earned experience, disguised as personal insight.Second, experts can better model the ‘ladder of knowledge’ in their field. Suppose a field has https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAhbFRMURtg&list=PLibNZv5Zd0dyCoQ6f4pdXUFnpAIlKgm3N&index=5

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/o6jkJftpnTQ6Lo7RB/how-we-hacked-business-school