Hacker News Reader

Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

One of my university teachers allowed us a double sided letter sized piece of paper during the exam and we could put whatever we felt like on it.

This was brilliant because 1. In real life, you don’t memorize random facts. That’s what reference books and the internet is for. 2. Making the cheat sheet actually forced us to understand the material so they we could sum it up and for it on the page. By the time we were done writing the sheet, we had memorized most of it anyway.

Yet another demonstration how school is completely out of touch with the jobs they’re claiming to be preparing you for.

View on HN

I had a couple teachers that allowed the cheat sheet, and it worked so well that I made them for every test, whether I could actually use them on the test or not. As you noted, it's such a great forcing function to identify and understand the most important bits.

I had an Econ teacher that did something similar but it was a note card. Thing was she reused the same bank of questions every semester and provided a study packet of sample questions that was a super set of the questions on the final. Some kids got wind of this and encoded the answers to the study packet on the index card. They were bizarrely accused of cheating.

I know someone who did something similar in analog electronics. The teacher asked them to come to their office, and asked them a few questions. As the student couldn't answer them, the perfect score was commuted into a failing grade.

Regardless of how you approach this, an exam is here to evaluate your level of proficiency on the topic at hand. If you sidestep this, that would be called cheating.

A university teacher allowed us to use everything during the exam, including a laptop with an internet connection. The only rule was that you weren't allowed to use any communication with other people, like messaging someone or asking questions on forums. Needless to say, everyone passed that exam.

For myself, the most-hated part of every exam session was having to memorize everything. That's what made me fail every single exam I've ever failed. I just can't bring myself to stuff information into my head and then give it back later. It's not a storage device. Yet most other teachers insisted that I need to do everything from memory. 95% of my school and university "education" was to memorize something, then recite it, and then forget it forever.

I've done open-everything exams (just no collaboration) and my experience was that it didn't change the mean grade, but it did increase the standard deviation. Students who were already mostly on top of the material could look things up and double-check their work, so their scores improved. Meanwhile, students who didn't really know what they needed to spent the whole time trying to find "the answer" in the book or online (and that's not the way programming tests work!), so in the end they either left the answer blank or put something totally nonsensical, copy-pasted off the internet. In a closed-book test, they would have at least tried to figure it out on their own, and maybe gotten a few partial-credit points.

> I just can't bring myself to stuff information into my head and then give it back later. It's not a storage device.

Funny, I thought that's pretty much exactly what it is.

> 95% of my school and university "education" was to memorize something, then recite it, and then forget it forever.

Did anyone actually order you to forget anything? I don't think that part was mandatory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com