When professor Pryby failed over half of his class in computational complexity a year ago, were the group that got failed out. The point is not so much how many hours they put in, but how hard unprepared students try to get up to speed. Naturally the "worst students" who put in max 30-35 hours a week are also among the group that eventually go on to fail the program, so 35 hours wasn't enough for up to half of the class.

If you're a professor, you maybe you've forgotten just how hard it is to be a student and be behind on the math understanding component.

I'm one of those tryhard dummies, everything takes twice or three times as long for me, but like the parable of the tortoise and the hare, I don't give up until the job is done, and over time I pass out the people who are able to stick the problem into their brain and pluck out a miracle solution with minimal effort.

Plus I tend to yak shave and spend time on reddit when procrastinating or letting problems digest. So I could probably be more efficient if I wanted to. I think your oversimplification of "the most unprepared students and 35 hours a week" doesn't take into account that some rare students put in 35 hours a week and still aren't there, and a subset of those are tryhard dummies.

Like right now for example, I'm trying to write code to identify columns with the most information gain and how to make linear combinations that are superior than the original set. But yet here I am arguing with trolls.