Reviewing iCanStudy Reddit Reviews #1
Is the iCanStudy course worth it? I’ll look at reddit reviews and add commentary as someone who finished the course.
TLDR: Generally I’m pro-iCanStudy as it’s the only course I know that teaches a repeatable strategy for encoding. However I attempt to explain where the (valid) criticism comes from, set more realistic expectations, and provide advice for current and future students.
Link: Review of Justin Sung’s icanstudy course: definitely not worth it
This is a negative review from Reddit that often comes up at the top of google. The post and comments are worth a read. Here are the post’s main points with my commentary:
The class largely feels like a marketing scam
This is a recurring theme in reviews. It seems to come from two places: (1) Justin Sung’s YouTube giving hand-wavey advice without concrete examples, (2) Early videos in the course consistently promising that powerful techniques will come later. I agree that it can be frustrating to buy a course and then still feel like you’re being sold to and you can’t have what you paid for.
the class follows the pattern of Justin telling students that by the end of the course, you’ll learn x, but never actually teaching X
So does the course teach the powerful techniques it keeps promising? It’s complicated. iCanStudy mostly isn’t trying to teach directly. The goal of the course is to provide the material and infrastructure for the student to actively acquire skills through experiments and practice. A student is likely to acquire powerful techniques if they use all the scaffolding: giving other students feedback, getting expert feedback, asking questions, working through practice scenarios, and more. But will a student be taught powerful techniques just by watching videos? Not really.
The course demands a great deal of type A executive functioning skills that frankly are probably very difficult for all but the most enterprising students to implement.
It’s true, you can’t just watch the videos. Serious effort is required. It’s a bit of a no-win situation for iCanStudy. They attempt to improve this situation by dedicating early lessons to developing these “executive functioning skills”. Unfortunately this pushes back the material that most students came for, bringing us back full circle to the “marketing scam” criticism.
A theme of the course is that if you do a technique incorrectly, it will erode your capacity to advance in the course, a claim that flies in the face of failure-driven learning, one of the best ways to learn.
There are a couple elements of the course that seem hypocritical. The reddit review mentions one: iCanStudy teaches self-learning and self-regulation, but asks for strict adherence to their techniques. Another: iCanStudy teaches non-linear studying but is a linear course enforced by time gates. What gives? My guess is that iCanStudy assumes new students don’t yet have the skills to self-regulate and learn non-linearly. Which make sense — they haven’t taken the course yet! However this is frustrating toward the end of the course when you’ve learned most of their techniques but still get a linear time gate.
I would heavily recommend finding other resources over investing in Sung’s course.
If you’re on the fence and haven’t dug into other resources yet, I’d recommend looking at other resources before investing in Sung’s course. iCanStudy has some unique techniques that will help you become an advanced learner. It’s good. But there are resources out there that will help you improve more immediately. For example check out Ali Abdaal’s YouTube course and start working on your revision and retrieval. Here’s a list of more resources: Learn to learn resources.
Link: edawgggydawg’s replies
the meat of his course really doesn’t begin until you’ve laid a solid foundation before the ascent stations (the encoding skills and theory)
Most iCanStudy students are focused on the parts of the course that teach encoding. What’s encoding? It’s putting information in your long-term memory in a way that is easy to retrieve when you need it.
iCanStudy’s focus on encoding is unique. There a lot people who advocate for encoding but don’t go any further. Here is what Piotr Wozniak, one of the alternative resources mentioned in the original post, has to say about encoding.
“Learn before you memorize” and “do not learn if you do not understand”. That’s not a lot! Piotr built a software program with complex algorithms and rules for retrieval. But Piotr, where are the algorithms and rules for encoding?
That’s what iCanStudy offers: rules for encoding.
I can say I was able to retain a lot of information much quicker and much more efficiently without having to put too much time into active recall and spaced repetition and flash cards. Most of my learning came from the encoding processing and simply critically thinking about the material at hand (judgmental comparison, differences vs similarities, identifying importance based chunks in different contexts)
This is essentially iCanStudy’s marketing material and it needs some serious asterisks. If you hope to become fluent in Chinese by critically thinking about it, I’ve got bad news for you. If you hope to draw one mindmap on Computer Science and become an expert, I’ve got bad news for you. Retrieval practice and spacing are incredibly important and no amount of advanced encoding technique will change that.
It’s not uncommon to see an iCanStudy student forego retrieval practice entirely for encoding techniques and not get the results they wanted. iCanStudy content is a bit light on retrieval and students can end up with a lopsided study system.
But most of my gains have come from that (prioritizing important relationships, making as much connections with everything else, layer learning ( building logical framework, concepts, then the details), importance based chunks, and using mindmaps as TOOL to facilitate my higher order learning.)
If you’re already a student with a solid revision schedule complete with spacing, interleaving, and active recall this comment will probably be true for you, too. If you don’t know what active recall is, start there instead. iCanStudy could help you with active recall, but so can other free resources.
Link: Public_Oil_1927’s reply
iCanStudy locks up your course for about 1 month in total - even when you’re actively paying for the subscription.
The time locks on the course are frustrating. You can’t move on to the next lesson until a certain number of weeks have passed.
Their course does not actually have many things to teach but Justin and his team deliberately makes the videos extremely long and have multiple videos on the same concept.
Some videos have extra fluff and feel more like pep talks than lessons. As I discussed earlier however, the videos are only a small portion of the course’s full scaffolding for learning.
They justified it saying they’re trying to help you learn better by NOT rushing through the course, even though they keep teaching you to pre-study everything. How can you pre-study their very own learning course when they deliberately lock it up
As mentioned before, this is one of the elements of the course that can feel hypocritical. It’s irritating, but to be fair: how you can prestudy prestudying if you don’t know how to prestudy?
They only focus on academic exams, not learning for application in real life.
The course is focused on students. Where this is most apparent is the assumption throughout the course that you are working with some type of well-defined curriculum that has some final end date. For professionals this assumption is false. If you're a professional taking the course, I recommend going in with well-defined curriculums like specific books or online courses. These will be useful for practice.
Link: SnooChipmunks2107’s reply
The repetition of and vague explanation of techniques felt like a chore.
Each technique is introduced gradually and over multiple lessons. The introductions can be vague because they want you to try it first. Sometimes there will be a concrete demonstration but mostly expect to acquire techniques through practice and experimentation.
The discord is a hot mess - discord just doesn’t suit this kind of community.
For getting feedback and getting questions answered the discord can be hit or miss. However maybe the most beneficial things you can do in the entire course is attempt to give other students feedback. Giving feedback is a big opportunity to objectively analyze study systems and techniques that are not your own, thereby helping you develop your own techniques.
All in all I think what they are missing is a concrete framework
iCanStudy expects you to build your own framework. It is really teaching a collection of techniques that you need to put together into a system.
Link: KrishnsAdvisor’s reply
Basically you need to learn the "Fundamentals" and you need to learn the "AIM step" of the Bear Hunter System.
I agree with the premise that certain parts of the course are more impactful than others.
Justin Sung's content is tailored for Medical Students, even if he does not say it.
People doing A Levels (except biology), languages and Organic Chemistry in uni will find his website useless because those subjects strictly require rote memorisation (flashcards).
There is no doubt that iCanStudy techniques are better for certain subjects than others. Specifically, iCanStudy techniques are better for subjects that are mostly declarative and conceptual like Psychology. My recommendation to people who want the most out of the course is to practice the course’s techniques on declarative subjects the techniques are good for.
How can you make sure your iCanStudy experience is positive?
Check out my article on preparing for iCanStudy that will help you go in with the best chance of success.