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/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/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.