To cheat or not to cheat? Hmmm...let me consult my notes.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have a math exam in a few days. We have been advised that we can take in one sheet of A4 paper. That paper can have anything on it - formulas, step by step notes for using the chain rule or the law of sines, a letter from gran, whatever. The only screening is to check that we only have one piece of paper, not the content.

Now, I’m a little confused by this; to me it feels like cheating. It’s been over 20 years since I was in high school, but I’m fairly sure we never had cheat sheets back then - we actually had to store everything in our heads.

Has the goal of education being that people learn how to do things changed? Or is this just how universities usually conduct exams?

As I stated, I feel like it’s cheating - it feels lazy, like they are just accomodating the students who can’t be bothered to learn the course work. But maybe I’m being harsh.

Anyone been in high school lately? Did they allow cheat sheets?

Any uni students, were you allowed to cheat?

Just to note - the 1st exam, I decided not to cheat. I left it up to my brain to hold what I needed to know. The coming exam…I would like to do it myself, but I am wavering - it would be nice to score a perfect 100. A cheat sheet would guarentee that, but it just doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.

2

I think I had some high school exams, and definitely university tests, where ‘cheat sheets’ were allowed. I always took advantage of them, and I suggest you do too.

The goal, as I understand it, is to destress rote memorization in education and put more stress on application. Therefore, you’re not penalized for making notes on the law of sines, as long as you (a) realize that it’s important enough to put on your cheat sheet and (b) can understand how to use it to solve the problem on the test.

It’s not cheating in the same way as a cheat sheet of the answers would be; you don’t know the questions in advance, so can’t put them on your sheet. If you think that having a cheat sheet would be enough to score a perfect 100, then by all means get yourself a perfect 100.

If the test was easy enough that they could let every student score a perfect 100 with a cheat sheet, they wouldn’t be allowing cheat sheets.

3

Rote memorization isn’t the same thing as learning. Some level of memorization is necessary but being able to use formulas appropriately is a better measure of mastery of the subject matter. How important is it to memorize all the formulas if in the real world you can look them up when you need to apply them?

In college (many moons ago) some professors allowed a single sheet of paper but it wasn’t common.

4

I had occasional classes in college that allowed this.

I actually noticed a few benefits to this approach:

[ul]
[li]You have to decide what to put on the piece of paper, and there might not be room for everything. The process of making this decision was a form of studying.[/li][li]It is real world. If you actually needed to do math at work/in real life you would be able to look up an equation. It’s knowing the equation exists and how to use it that is the takeaway.[/li][/ul]

5

I agree 100% with Lunar Eclipse. I had some math classes like that in high school and college and it was a far more effective technique than just trying to memorize everything rather than think about how to use it.

6

This is NOT the kind of cheating I came in here for. :slight_smile:

7

+1 :wink:

But seriously, I agree it forces you to decide what you don’t actually remember and thus need on the sheet.

BTW, In my history class, she gave take home quizzes regularly. I never needed the book to get high grades. And “open book” tests are quite common.

8

I’d take full advantage of the professor’s offer. It’s not cheating; you won’t have the answers to the math problems on your sheet of paper. You will be able to write formulas or whatever to help you, but solving the specific problems on the test will still be up to you.

9

Print very, very small and bring magnifying glass.

10

One of my professors had a rule that you could bring in any damn thing you wanted on exam day. His view was, “In the real world, no one is ever going to tell you, ‘Every answer you need is here in this book, but you can’t look at it!’” Being able to find and use the information you need is just as important a skill as having it memorized.

11

I agree with all above. Its only cheating if your sheet is the answer key to the test.

However you should be warned that if you expect to rely too much on a whole lot of information crammed onto a small piece of paper you may find that you don’t have time to finish the exam. So you need to be quick with all of the problem solving techniques and just use the sheet to refresh your memory as to certain formulas.

12

That’s the real telling thing here. I had plenty of grad school courses where the profs didn’t care at all if we brought a formula sheet in, on that exact premise. Why require us to memorize them if we’d just look them up in the real world? We were better off being required to understand them and how to use them rather than be able to regurgitate them on demand.

Quite a few didn’t care if we brought our books, notes, laptops, etc… either, under the same rationale of Max Torque’s professor.

13

All my engineering classes were “open book” – we could bring anything we wanted, and make full use of it. Quite a few students panicked the first such test, and loaded themselves with the CRC, Perry’s, McCabe, Smith, Harriott and other ChemE tests… and scored miserably because they wasted all their time flipping through books.

Tests that allow you to bring references are testing that you know how to identify the problem being given and know which of the tools to use to solve it and understand how to use that tool correctly. Where the tool may be an equation, theorem, whatever.

This will not be an easy test, even with a “cheat sheet”. If allowed, you’ll want to make sure you show all your work (i.e., the steps you took to arrive at the answer). Some professors posed problems designed to rattle students even though they had the book open in front of them – e.g., “calculate the total negative or postive charge of Earth” in a physics test; even if you got the right equations to use, carrying the huge exponents was tricky too.

14

Most of my college courses from the last decade were open book exams. Instructors usually worked it into the test plan by either:
Having you write essay style answers where being able to confirm that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 was a small part of explaining the significance of the journey.
-or-
Having multiple choice/fill in the blank exams but having so many questions that looking up each answer was impractical. If you knew most of it, you’d sail through but if you needed to look up every question, you’d be luck to have a 75% completed exam when time was up.

Mind you, I haven’t taken much math lately so I can’t speak for exams in that area.

15

When I took statistics 25 years ago, every test was open book/open note. I can’t imagine they’ve tightened things in this more pampered age.

16

I found that the process of creating the cheat sheet often resulted in not needing it during the exam. Somehow writing the information down helped to cement it in my brain.

(It’s not cheating if everyone has the same instructions on what they can and cannot bring into the exam.)

17

All the way through grad school, allowing a cheat sheet was fairly common. To some extent, I felt like the OP does, but I think it depends on how it is approached. If I’m at work, as a programmer, and I can’t remember a particular syntax or function or I need to work out some formulae, I look it up. What’s important isn’t the memorization of all that stuff, but knowing what I need and how to apply it.

Particularly when it comes to math, there’s two sides to it, one is knowing a formula or algorithm, and the other is knowing how to apply it. A student could have his entire textbook there and the right formula, but if they haven’t learned what it means and how to apply it, it won’t do them that much good.

So, to that end, I appreciate using a cheat sheet. If it was something like what the OP mentions, I’d have no problem writing down a few formulae. Generally, when I did use a cheat sheet, I’d write on it in my normal hand-writing and it would just have a few things on it and, ultimately, I’d rarely use it because, by writing it down and knowing how to derive it, I generally didn’t need to refer to it. OTOH, I remember seeing plenty of people who would bring in a cheat sheet and it would be in very tiny handwriting and covering both sides. I’d often see them refering to it constantly. It’s the latter that really bothers me, because they very well may have step-by-step instructions on everything on the exam.

Another thing to keep in mind, at least as my professors had said a couple of times, is that they tune the difficulty and scoring of the exams based upon what they allow. If it was in class with no sheet and no calculators, they probably wouldn’t require really complex arithmetic and would stick more to concepts. If they allowed calculators, they’re probably have more difficult math involved. If they allowed a reference sheet, they’d probably include a few of the more obscure formulae or be less forgiving in partial credit on incorrectly remembering or applying a formula. And if it was open book or take home, it just got that much harder and that much more harshly graded. So, to that extent, you’re potentially handicapping yourself by not bringing a reference sheet in the same way that if they allow a calculator, and then you’re expected to calculate answers to precision that is unreasonable by hand, at least in the time allotted to the exam.

So, personally, I don’t see why you have to take an all-or-nothing approach to this. Think about what the test is on, decide what parts you feel like are fair to be on a reference sheet, for which I think a series of formulae is perfectly reasonable. Personally, I think having full-out examples of all the different types of problems you might expect to be going too far, and I generally don’t find those very useful anyway, so I wouldn’t include that.

18

It’s definitely not cheating if the class allows you to bring in the materials.

As others have said, open-book or limited material testing is definitely more common in classes that are expecting you to show application of the material rather than just memorization. I finished my accounting degree online, so every test was designed with the assumption that you were taking it open-book. You couldn’t look up all of the questions in the time allotted and many of the questions required that you were already familiar with the principles. You might look up a particular detail or name, but if you couldn’t come up with the framework of the answer out of your head, you were doomed.

In many ways, I think this actually makes tests better. In the real world, that’s exactly how accounting questions work. All of the material is out there for you to access. Even if you memorized it last year, it’s probably changed this year. So you remember general principles and get good at finding the details you need quickly.

19

In engineering school, we called these crib sheets, and they were commonly allowed in exams. The idea is that you’re learning something by preparing the crib sheet itself (i.e., what to put on the paper). And of course in the real world, you’re going to have access to books and technical reference materials. Lots of students tried micro-printing, either by hand or by printer. And in the April Fool’s issue of the college newspaper, they ran an advertisement for three-dimensional crib sheet paper.

20

There are a great number of students who have memory-freeze when it comes to test. Something like this allows them a chance to use what they’ve figured out they need in advance. I had open-book tests in High School and College (in the late '60’s-early '70’s), so this isn’t really anything new.