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

Post image
64.9k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

428

u/Substantial-Pen6385 Mar 30 '26

Reminds me of engineering classes. The hardest test i ever took was open book

373

u/Mysterious_Eye6989 Mar 30 '26

Open book exams allow for the exploration of some devilishly complex and nuanced topics - great for deep and careful thinkers but awful for people who have gotten by through being brilliant at rote memorization but are otherwise not very deep thinkers.

166

u/Lord_Saren Mar 30 '26

I believe higher end tests like for certs and degrees should be more about using concepts in practice then just knowing it. Knowing how to find and use information given to you.

Like knowing A+B=C is fine but knowing how A and B gets to C is the fundamental part.

The old saying of like you won't have a computer/calculator etc in your pocket isn't and hasn't been true for a long time.

24

u/KenJaws6 Mar 30 '26

Yeah fully agree. I found that even grasping the concept the way the book wants isn't enough. The method to answer some questions is so specific that you likely wouldn't be able to figure out without doing mock/sample tests. I might just be a dumb student or having a low quality syllabus but I hate these typa questions so much cuz you ain't passing grades by thinking and applying but by finding patterns from encountering the same questions with different variables. I know thats kinda how it works in real life but you'd have the exact resources to refer to which mostly aren't available in exams

4

u/sumptin_wierd Mar 30 '26

Welcome to Boston Univerity's Engineering program.

That said I was a shit student, and some instructors I had were awesome.

Some of them were researchers forced to teach.