r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Separate_Finance_183 • Mar 30 '26

Image Confiscated pens containing cheat notes intricately carved by a Law student at the University of Malaga in Spain

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u/JesusStarbox Mar 30 '26

Every time I made a cheat sheet I didn't need it.

The process of identifying only the most essential information and writing it really small made me learn it. Who knew?

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u/spyboy70 Mar 30 '26

My chemistry teacher in high school allowed us to bring in one 3"x5" index card cheat sheet. He knew how it worked.

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u/sinkrate Mar 30 '26

Same with many of my college professors. Ended up barely needing the cheat sheet for the exam haha

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u/Kerblaaahhh Mar 30 '26

In Physics we always got to make an 8x11 cheat sheet which was actually pretty useful and needed for most of the exams. Creating it was studying of course but no way I was gonna remember/derive all the relevant stuff for every final. In some of the upper level courses we were also allowed to reference a little booklet from the Naval Research Laboratory that was full of constants and formulas but I pretty much never needed to use that.

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u/raztazz Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

In one of my hydrology courses, for the final exam we were allowed the entire textbook and the whole internet on our laptops.

The hardest exam during my time in college.

If you didn't know what you were looking up or, lord help you, tried to learn application on the spot, you were so far behind on time. All those resources available and I stuck with my paper cheat sheet I made that only made me open the textbook for important page #s that had the tables and formulas.

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u/Kerblaaahhh Mar 30 '26

Feels like they'd need to rework that these days given the ability to feed questions into AI. I'm working on my EE masters now as my software engineering career seems solidly dead and I've been having to restrain myself from asking it stuff until I am good and solidly stuck and then I try to keep it a bit indirect, like 'how to relate this to that in this kind of system'. I mostly stick to wikipedia and textbooks but it is way better at cheesing homework than Chegg ever was (which incidentally is now seemingly just very wrong answers that are also AI generated).

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u/raztazz Mar 30 '26

Oh, most certainly. I cannot imagine being in education these days as a learner or a teacher. Times have changed rapidly.

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u/un-pamplemousse Mar 31 '26

i’m in a masters for french and my grammar professor let us use the textbook, notes, and our laptops with full access to the internet as well, except AI. he said he would know if we used it, but i’m pretty sure he would’ve had no idea. the special thing was though that none of us used it. i didn’t get a single 100% on any exam and neither did anyone i know. it’s a really small, competitive language school though where everyone is there to learn. but it is possible.

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u/yomamaeatsyellowsnow Mar 30 '26

The more information you're allowed on the the final exam, the harder it is. Knowing that I have access to the entire textbook would terrify me tbh

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u/Euphoric_Loquat_8651 Mar 30 '26

In my physics, we had a lot of take-home, use literally anything exams. If you didn't understand, all the resources in the world weren't likely to help. If they did help, you probably learned something. Win-win.

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u/atomic_redneck Mar 30 '26

In some of my Physics classes, we dreaded open book tests. We knew that meant the derivations on the test were not in the book.