Playing by the rules is not cheating. I agree that this is actually better than just cramming with rote memorization for exams, students have to think about what they’ll put on that paper. It adds some significance to the grade they get. It’s also the way the real world works, at work we have problems with people who don’t bother to check things and just work off of memory. I couldn’t do my job in that manner, and outside of work I ought to apply that principle more often and avoid a lot of stupid mistakes.
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that equation, though obviously I recognize the correction factors from the ideal gas law. Then again, I decided long ago that chemical engineering was not for me. Heck, physical organic is not for me.
Anyway, by definition it’s not cheating. I agree with the others that it has two purposes. First, that it is a form of studying, at least if the sheet is prepared correctly. And second, that it’s pointless to test rote memorization at any sort of advanced level but that a crib sheet allows testing of understanding instead.
Rote memorization is stupid and doesn’t actually mean you know anything. Me knowing the division algorithm by heart is not going to help me actually implement it. My college has actually done away with traditional exams because of this - we have essays, homework, open book quizzes, and did I say lots and lots of homework? And proofs for discrete math. Discrete math is definitely one a cheat sheet would be great, because you have to show proofs for everything anyway.
Whenever I made cheat sheets (legal ones!) I found that just the process of making it helped me remember the stuff so I wound up hardly referring to them anyway.
We had open-book tests.
At a job interview I had an editing/spelling/grammar type test and there were available to me a dictionary, an AP style guide, and a couple of other reference books of the sort you might actually use while editing. I guess they felt if you knew you couldn’t spell a word and needed to look it up, that was okay. If you had to look up every word you would flunk the timed test on account of taking too long.
I also found a very effective study method was to make myself a cheat sheet. After making it, I didn’t need to take it into the test.
(Okay on preview thats just what TBG said but true for me, too.)
If they let you take the paper in, it’s not cheating. Cheating is doing something you’re not supposed to.
Yep, me too. And I recall a study that says that this only works when you hand write it, typing doesn’t help as much. For me, taking notes in school was much more help than actually studying with them.
Let me start by making it perfectly clear: this is not cheating. The exam might be harder than it would have otherwise, but it will not test rote memory. It will test understanding and may test whether you can apply what you learned. What is taught in a math class is (or ought to be a new way of thinking).
One of my pet peeves was that students who had had AP calculus thought they had learned calculus; they hadn’t. At best they learned how to differentiate the standard functions. But try asking them to compute a simple limit and expect incomprehension. At McGill, American students who had AP credits were put into a calculus I class which gave 3 credits instead of 4, but otherwise used the identical syllabus to the beginning calculus course. This is explains the difference between memorization and learning.
Incidentally, when I allowed my students a “cheat sheet” I felt that the main advantage was not the use they made of it during the exam but what they learned in the process of preparing it. I picked them up afterwards and some were truly works of art.
I even had classes where the cheat sheet was part of the grade, you handed it in along with the exam. One of them was Biochemistry: the teacher stopped the exam to ask a friend and me whether we’d worked together to prepare them (we had), as it was the first time someone had used both sides (one for anabolic reactions, one for catabolic reactions); we got twice the real estate for the same price. Preparing that “map of reactions” was a helluva workup, one of the best exam preps I’ve had.
Count me in with the people who had their cribnotes turned in as part of the test.
I’ve made them for everything from a proofreading/editing course, english history, american history, math, and various sciences.
I am impressed that many of you got full sheets of paper - I always was told to use a 3x5 card, and the difference was whether you got to use the front only, or the front and back.
They always had to be handwritten, and we either had to show them to the teacher/professor before the test, or turn them in with the test. I’ve gotten lots of comments on my tiny architect-style block-lettering.
I approve of them, because I get really nervous right before a test, and blank on everything ever. It’s like a little security blanket, so I can get past the nerves and just get into the test. Like a lot of others, if I’ve spent a lot of time designing and making the card, I don’t actually reference it that much during the test.
I will say that I hate open-book tests UNLESS they are also take-home tests. If I’m going to drag my heavy-ass textbook and my notes into a test, I want to NEED them, and often I didn’t, because it wasn’t a good use of testing time to go scrabbling through for one particular date or factoid. Then I was just grumpy that I had to drag them around an extra day for no reason.
At the third-grade level, I actively try to discourage kids from your sort of thinking. A lot of the smarter kids think that if they have to look something up, it’s a sign of stupidity: they should have everything memorized. When it comes to the reading end-of-grade test, they’ll read a passage once and then answer all the questions without going back and rereading or looking up answers. And they bomb the test.
Being able to go back to the source (or your notes) is a key skill, a lot more important than memorization. I want to challenge kids to do things that are impossible to do from memory, and as such I want them to take excellent notes that can be used when it comes time to perform.
As a high school teacher of physics I would have loved to just let my students use any damn resource they wanted to take a test. Unfortunately I don’t think this would have gone over very well with the other physics teachers who taught the same classes. There is a certain amount of fairness that needs to happen when you have multiple teachers teaching the same subject at the same school. So we all settled on just giving them a formula sheet, or I think in the case of the final exam, allowing a single 3x5 notecard of anything they wanted to put on it (and also giving them a formula sheet).
So yes, in high school physics at least, we gave them the formulas and sometimes let them use their own notes, and I would not have been opposed to allowing them to use their books or binders either.
And the reasons for this have already been thoroughly discussed, but just to reiterate, I don’t care as a physics teacher how good a student is at memorizing formulas. That’s not what physics is supposed to be. And no one in the real world is going to expect you to not be able to use whatever resources you want to solve a problem or complete a task, and that’s the whole fucking point of an exam: to test a student’s ability to solve a problem or complete a task.
Now, a subject like history or whatever? Maybe I can see where memorization is the skill you are testing and wouldn’t allow notes.
And you know what? That’s what makes history so goddamn boring. Let’s just memorize a whole lot of facts that anyone can look up in a book, but not, say, look at the implications of the facts, or how it would be nowadays. Rattle off the preamble but don’t understand what it means. Better know when the Declaration of Independence was signed and the first five signers but don’t really look into the meaning of it.
I think history would be much better with open book exams, too. Rote memorization is useless. Let’s apply these concepts and actually educate our kids!
Totally agreed. There are very few subjects for which the best test requires memorization. Unless you’re testing, for example an actor’s ability to remember lines, it’s far better to design a test that requires higher-order thinking skills.
Wanna test me on history? Ask me to compare and contrast the reigns of Empress Theodora and Cleopatra, but give me the resources to draw on. Don’t ask me to tell you from memory the years of their reigns.
I had a college professor that was a complete dick when it came to exams. The class was heat transfer and open books were allowed, mostly for the tabular and graphic data in the appendices. The dick move was in specifying a textbook in SI units for the course but giving the tests in English units. That guy was an asshole.
While any good history class will include essays that test higher level thinking, comparison, contrasting, and analytical skills, a LOT of state and district standards are extremely specific and require memorization. So history teachers are basically forced to teach the kids to memorize historical facts if they want them to perform well on district and state assessments which are always multiple choice.
And yeah, physics had these too. But guess what? The physics test came with a formula sheet from the state/district. Much less memorization required to do well on those tests.
Can you tell I’m not much of a fan of state/district mandated testing? It was one of the key reasons I got out of teaching.
Sorry for the hijack and I’ll end it now.