Austin Scholar #171: My summer project: using AI to help every kid achieve today's top 10% academic results

& an introduction to BrainLifts

Hey, y'all!

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. My summer project: using AI to help every kid achieve today's top 10% academic results

2. Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

I got so many questions after my last newsletter about my investing journey! The short summary is that I’ve decided to spend the summer truly becoming an expert in investing – so I’m reading for six hours every single day to ensure that I’m learning as much as I can in the time that I have. At the end of the summer, I’ll know if investing is something I truly want to work towards and gain skills in. I’ll definitely be writing more about this, so stay tuned!

Also, I’ve been in London all week, and it’s been incredible. I’ve learned so much about how the culture and art has changed over the past few hundred years and explored beautiful places like The Wallace Collection, Brunswick House, and a ton of random alleyways. The project I'm working on is under wraps for now, but I'm so excited to tell you all about it as soon as I can!

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My summer project: using AI to help every kid achieve today's top 10% academic results

One of the most controversial truths about our education system is that it’s IQ and conscientiousness-coded. Right now, the way we structure classrooms, grade assignments, and design standardized tests almost guarantees that the students who shine academically are those with the highest raw cognitive horsepower (high IQ) and the most disciplined work ethic (high conscientiousness). Meanwhile, a vast majority of students (those with average or below-average IQ and/or conscientiousness) get left in the dust.

This reality has left generations of parents, teachers, and students thinking certain kids are just born "good at school," while other kids naturally just "aren't good at learning."

I have a project this summer: I believe I can design a new system for all students to achieve what is today considered to be top 10% academic performance (based on the nationwide NWEA MAP test), where IQ and conscientiousness aren’t a prerequisite for success. I truly believe this is doable. The barriers we’ve accepted aren’t immutable. High IQ and high conscientiousness aren’t actually necessary conditions for academic potential. .

If not me, who?

After ten years of virtually no traditional classroom teaching, a perfect 1600 SAT, and going to Stanford, I know better than anyone that the narratives about the traditional schooling model aren't true. And I've got the data-backed insights to prove that my experience isn't a crazy fringe case. It’s my responsibility to show that students are capable of far more than the current IQ-and-grit dogma allows.

Kids can and will rise to the occasion – once we stop letting “innate ability” and “natural discipline” be the gatekeepers.

AI gives me superpowers

For a rising college sophomore, designing and testing a nationwide learning system would normally be an extremely daunting project. But today’s AI tools equip every student with capabilities that far exceed the capacity of a mere human. So during this project, I’ll be using a multitude of different AI models and tools to both explain, prove, and build this learning system – and I’ll be showing you exactly what I’m doing each step of the way.

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One thing Alpha High is great at (better than Stanford, in my opinion) is getting students ready to thrive in an AI world. In their freshman year of high school, every student is taught how to build a “BrainLift,” which is a tool to both help you build expertise in topics of your choice as well as collect and build upon your knowledge to become your supercharged thought partner. BrainLifts have been an incredibly important tool for me on my academic journey, and they're a core part of the system I'm starting to build. Fittingly, I'm also using my BrainLift to help me build this project. In today's article, I'm going to teach you how a BrainLift works, and show you how I'm using mine to help me work on this project.

The basic concept is that you have a place (WorkFlowy, Notion, Google Docs, etc.) to store all of your information, knowledge, and insights about an area and you can feed all of that to AI to help you brainstorm new ideas and push the frontier of knowledge.

To use a BrainLift to become an expert, students have to start by understanding the Depth of Knowledge framework (a staple in learning science which breaks down the four levels of developing knowledge).

Your BrainLift is made up of facts, summaries, insights, and spiky POVs about your topic, each of those four things indicating that you’ve reached a new level within the DOK framework:

• DOK 1 (Facts & Recall): Definitions, formulas, dates. This is the first level of building knowledge, and the most basic form of knowledge.

• DOK 2 (Skills & Concepts): Summaries of long-form content (for many students, their summaries are primarily of articles or X posts). This is level two of building knowledge: understanding the facts enough to create your own summaries.

• DOK 3 (Strategic Thinking): Having insights on those facts and summaries. This is the third level of building knowledge.

• DOK 4 (Extended Thinking): Non-consensus insights, original ideas, spiky POVs. The point in your knowledge journey where you can begin developing your own unique takes on the topic, and the sign that you’ve reached expertise.

This BrainLift structure was one of the most helpful things I learned at Alpha High, and it’s how I start every one of my projects. Because I’ve spent years studying education, I’m leaping straight into DOK 3 and DOK 4. But if you’re starting fresh in a new field or area, start with DOK 1 before anything else.

DOK 3 Insight: The Dual-Pillar Model

“Performance in standard school K–8 is IQ-coded. Kids with high scores in Big 5 conscientiousness do dramatically better. Generally, the highest academic performers in a school score highly on both.”

I put those DOK 3 insights into OpenAI’s o-3 model and asked for deep academic research and information about the above DOK 3 insight. Here’s what it returned:

DOK 2 Findings (from AI)

1. The literature strongly supports the dual-pillar view: cognitive ability is the main engine; conscientiousness is the fuel-efficiency system.

2. Labeling K–8 performance as “IQ-coded” is accurate for concept mastery at DOK 3, but grades and real-world outcomes are co-coded by both IQ and conscientiousness.

3. Top performers generally land in the upper quartile on both traits, yet there’s no hard cutoff—compensation occurs, especially in less cognitively demanding subjects.

“Ability opens the classroom door; conscientiousness keeps the student in the seat and the pen on the paper.”

DOK 1 Sources and Facts (from AI)

• Poropat, A. E. (2009). A meta-analysis of personality–academic performance relations. Psychological Bulletin, 135(2), 322–338.

• Briley, D. A., Domiteaux, M., & Tucker-Drob, E. M. (2014). Achievement can be maximized, not just predicted, by Conscientiousness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(1), 148–168.

• Sachse, K. A. et al. (2014). Intelligence and school achievement: A meta-analysis. Learning and Individual Differences, 29, 14–23.

• Deary, I. J., Strand, S., Smith, P., & Fernandes, C. (2007). Intelligence and educational achievement. Intelligence, 35(1), 13–21.

• Tucker-Drob, E. M., & Harden, K. P. (2012). Intellectual interest mediates gene × SES interaction on adolescent academic achievement. Child Development, 83(2), 743–757.

Because I already have the knowledge to have the DOK 3 insights, I can ask AI to do the work of finding information and summaries to support it.

DOK 4: The Spiky POV

You can get all students to today’s top 10% performance by using a mastery-based AI tutor that generates personalized learning plans and uses spaced repetition, and you can also replace conscientiousness with extrinsic rewards and motivation.

Imagine every student utilizing an AI tutor that not only diagnoses their conceptual gaps but also tailors challenge levels and paces reinforcement, along with Guides who, because their role isn’t teaching academic content, spend their time getting to know each student and what motivates them. Then, the motivation to complete this top 10% goal will also be completely personalized to each student.

If this hypothesis holds, the impacts on our education system as a whole are incredible:

• Intelligence and grit would no longer be the bottlenecks. Any student with access to an AI-powered BrainLift could reach elite performance levels.

• Under-resourced schools and under-served communities can deploy low-cost AI tutors, erasing disparities driven by teacher availability or funding.

• Parents will see that effort and strategy – augmented by AI – trump innate ability. They’ll invest in tools and mindsets, not expensive prep courses.

This is more than a summer side project – it’s a blueprint for a new era of learning, where every student has the chance to be in the top 10%, regardless of their starting line.

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Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

1. Shoe Dog

I have to agree with Warren Buffett: this is the best book I’ve read in the last year. This memoir by Nike's founder is one of the most honest books about money I've ever read. Knight borrowed $50 from his dad in 1962 and turned it into a $30+ billion company, but the path was absolutely chaotic.

Two of Knight's takeaways:

• Hire great people first. Knight hired talented people before he knew what jobs they'd do, including his future wife who was his accounting student

• Cash flow is everything. Nike almost went bankrupt multiple times not because they weren't profitable, but because they couldn't manage cash flow

This memoir reads like an adventure novel, not a boring corporate biography – Knight admits to lying, making terrible decisions, and nearly losing everything repeatedly. I absolutely loved this memoir and can’t recommend it enough.

2. A Random Walk Down Wall Street

This book tells you why most investing strategies don't work. Malkiel, a Princeton economist, spent 50+ years studying markets and came to a controversial conclusion: you probably can't beat the market, so stop trying.

He believes that stock prices move randomly (a "random walk"), which means past performance can't predict future results. All the fancy analysis and hot stock tips? Mostly useless noise that costs you money in fees and bad decisions.

Malkiel's core arguments:

• Efficient Market Hypothesis: Markets are so efficient at pricing information that by the time you hear about a "great opportunity," it's already reflected in the stock price

• Index funds are the way to go: Since you can't consistently beat the market, just buy the whole market through low-cost index funds

• Time in market > timing the market: Your biggest advantage is starting early and staying invested, not trying to pick the perfect moment to buy or sell

Malkiel basically told an entire industry (financial advisors, fund managers, stock analysts) that they're mostly adding no value while charging high fees. At the end of the book, Malkiel provides an extremely in-depth, step-by-step process to investing in a collection of stocks (index funds), bonds, cash, and real estate to set you up for retirement.

I completely agree that for most people, this is true. However, from what I’ve learned thus far about investing (particularly from the Warren Buffett biography, Snowball), I believe that if you truly are an expert in the area that you are investing in, you will be able to see things that don’t ensure a 100% efficient market. But this does require complete expertise in your area.

3. Learning the Severance theme song on the piano

To give myself a break from my investing reading (yes, I continued reading even in London), I’ve been learning how to play the Severance theme song on the piano. It’s such an ominous song that I have a blast setting quite the mysterious tone while playing it. (I have had to modify the song because the video looks like it requires more than two hands to play – or maybe I just can’t reach the keys well enough? – but it’s still super fun.) This is a great activity to hold me over until Severance season three.

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Thanks for reading. Go crush the week! See y'all on Sunday.