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by snogglethorpe
4307 days ago
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The "cheat sheet" thing was common at my university too. It often turned into an exercise in finding the extreme bottom limit to how small one could write (and turned me into a fan of Pilot Hi-Tec 0.25mm pens!), so I always wondered how carefully considered the limitation to one sheet was... did they actually try out different limits and choose the one that worked best? More limitation forces students to think about what they're including instead of just copying the textbook onto paper, but even a slight relaxation to 4-5 pieces of paper would have really helped in many cases, and allowed us to focus more on the material and less on the physical chore of preparation... |
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The idea was 1) in the real world, you have reference material which you should know how to use, and 2) test length did NOT include any extra time to look things up.
If you knew the material and just needed a quick check of some detail, you could look it up without any problem because you didn't have to search. On the other hand, if you were trying to teach yourself some concept during the test, the wasted time would probably impact how much of the test you were able to complete.
I liked that system - it seemed rather generous coming from "nothing allowed" tests in earlier schooling, and it had a side benefit of reducing the number of profs that badly reused exam questions or lazily used textbook-provided questions.
/* Yes, this policy caused some of us to find the one printer on campus that printed on A3 paper with duplex support, so we could print an electronic-only reference book at 24 pages/sheet (if I remember correctly...) */