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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

I never went to med school, but in HS I had my beloved modded HP48 that could store loads of text. I didn't manage to wire it to my computer so I resorted to type everything manually.

After a whole day of char-by-char input.. I knew everything by heart and didn't need to look it up in the calculator.

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Reminds me of my attempts to make cheat sheets that I would use during exams. I would write out a small cheat sheet the night before I never needed to use those cheat sheets as I would always remember whatever I had written on them. After a few cases when I remembered the whole contents of those sheets, I would just use them as last minute revision aid and discard them before getting into the examination hall.

Good old the last minute L1 cache warm up.

I had some professors in high school that would encourage us to write a cheat sheet, with the caveat that you had to fit everything into a standard note card.

Unfortunately, there was a foreign student that was so ahead of everyone, that he simply increased the difficulty of the tests and would curve them, excluding that one student from the curve. It was normal for most of the class to get 60s-70s, while this student would get 90s on his exams. I say unfortunately, but only jokingly.

One of my high school teachers used an accumulating curve just for this reason - a number of pre-written tests were rotated out pretty randomly and your grade was scaled in relation to everyone who had ever taken the test. It did fail to account for anomalies like the teacher discussing a subject particularly poorly one year but it was pretty fair feeling.

You would think you would ignore outliers when bell-curving.

"Timmy missed the exam because her grand-ma is dead, so I'm giving him a 0 everybody else an extra 10%"

> "Timmy missed the exam because her grand-ma is dead, so I'm giving him a 0 everybody else an extra 10%"

Years later, police discovered evidence Sally replaced Timmy’s grandma’s insulin bottle contents with glucose in order to pass that test.

Even worse, sounds like a perverse incentive to kill Timmy's grandma.

That's how I've always seen bell curving. In Quebec, to get into something like medicine they look at your z-rating, which if how far ahead of the bell curve you are... so at best it selects for people who pick easy classes and at worst for people who actively sabotage other students. To me it always sounded like a great way to end up with psychopaths as doctors.

Some of my high school professors treated cheating differently depending on the type of the cheat sheet used: handwritten ones would get ignored, but printed one would be punished.

I did the same, with the added part of chanting the contents of the sheet in my head when entering the exam room and then re-creating the sheet from short-term (rather than long-term) memory.

Fortunately more recent exams that I've taken allowed the use of a single sheet of paper as a cheat sheet.

I used to do the same, often used to get weird looks from others, presumably thinking that I was going to cheat during the exam. I used to intentionally dispose of or put away the sheet in a way that it was seen to avoid suspicion.

In my high school a few years before me there was a legendary cheating ring that would tap out the answers to each other in Morse code which was presented as tapping a pencil eraser on the desk like they were thinking. Unfortunately for them it was long enough ago that one of the teachers knew Morse code and so it didn't last.

Should have used rot13.

Oh weird, a HS friend that was failing urged me to follow this idea. I don't know if he heard of it or if he invented it on the spot (necessity mother of invention etc). We only used it once and it raised his grades by a lot obviously.

It also had infrared so you could even use chat apps. It was attenuated for short range precisely for this reason but obviously that protection was useless in the hands of electronics students.

I still have my 48GX. Though I never used it at an exam. As computer science student I simply never had any exams that required a calculator. I just had it for personal interests.

I only ever used that infrared to control the classroom vcr, to the absolute befuddlement of the teacher. Only time I’ve seen someone tap the side of a vcr to fix whatever is broken with it.

I used the serial cable to hook it up to my computer and loaded it with minigames, to play during class.

You can tell I was not the best of students.

I remember the time I took a 1200 baud modem and a phone cord to school with me so that I could log into the county library system, which provided shell accounts, and check my email during class. My physics teacher didn’t seem very appreciative, but the kids with lesser calculators were impressed.

It was just a resistor away from full range ?

I keep dreaming of modding a 48 series to snatch an esp mcu in it.

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