Being free to learn what you want in University is amazing, except for one problem: prerequisites
So I'm sitting in class right now learning about binary number representations for the 2nd time. This strikes me as extremely foolish, since both classes I learned this in are required courses for my degree and I'm taking them at the same time. This appears to be just another example of institutional stupidity by my university, but actually this is a harder problem in general. The two classes that I'm referring to are not required to both be taken. If that was the case, then many degree plans that only need one of those courses would be forced to take both, or another course would have to be designed for them. It seems obvious to me that it's impossible to set up the gargantuan set of course offerings such that classes will never share material if they're likely to both be taken together. It's impossible because schools try their best to give people freedom in the courses they choose to take, and so they'd like to make prerequisite structures as small and unrestrictive as possible. This is a goal that I agree with and that I think is definitely worth the cost, and so I'm sad that we're left with this unfortunate consequence of wasted learning as a result of greater freedom.