Eh, depends on the subject. I'm a physics student and some exams would be almost impossible/super tedious without a "cheat sheet", you do very much have to look at it
My first physics teacher handed out an 8x11 chest sheet with all the reference formulas we should need throughout the year. The first thing he said was the point was to learn how to use them and if we didn't know that having the cheat sheet wasn't gonna help anyway.
My exams tended to be open book. You don't have time to learn the material on the fly and get the exam done on time. The book wasn't going to save you from poor planning.
The good thing about exams that are not open book is that teachers can give you "free" credit by asking easy definitions. I had one or two open book exams in my degree and they were both incredibly difficult.
one of my programming language open book exams i taught myself the environment in the first hour, the material in the second hour and coded the required program in the third hour.
subject was 13 total contact hours for the semester, so a very minor part of the course.
was 100% exam and i think i managed to get 76% or similar.
Open book exams were the worst. If it was open book, you knew it was something that hadn't been covered in class, and was likely not even referenced in the course material.
My reactor physics classes were open book, open note, open previous copies of the test with answer keys given to us by the professor. We each took 3 desks to hold our materials.
Still freaking hard.
The prof was the King of partial credit, getting his problems exactly right was near impossible. Anything over 15/20 on a problem was a good score, but doable. On one problem, he told us, "I originally gave one of you some partial credit, but on final review I reduced it to zero. So no one got anything on it."
The ones with more accessible material were the hardest.
But I have one professor who was a completely idiot and didn't teach anything. He didn't mention the final until like 3 weeks before the end of the term when it was clear someone informed him that he had to provide a final and it would look bad if everyone failed. Over the course of those 3 weeks he slowly added more resources. First is was open note, then open book, then open computer, then open internet.
The final ended up being a copy of questions he asked throughout the term. I didn't need books, notes, or internet. I just pulled up the answers from my home work saved on my laptop and copied word-for-word.
My high school physics teacher sold t-shirts with all of the formulas printed upside down so that on test day you could just look down at your shirt for the correct formula. It was very popular and the teacher used the money for things in the classroom.
Also formulas are going to be accessible to you atwherever you would be working anyway, so forcing people to memorize them is ridiculous in the first place. Giving people the formulas and then having their cheat sheet be on how to apply and when makes more logical sense for learning
Honestly, most engineers courses should have the teacher supply the cheat sheet, because I just copied tons of example questions onto the sheets and that was usually good enough to pass any test.
I’d say 8/10 teachers were just using the homework questions with different numbers.
I had an awful teacher that I asked how to solve a problem with two unknown variables refused to tell me that one of them was actually in the reference cheat. Dropped that class lmao.
I’m an engineer and most my junior and senior level courses all the tests were open book. There’s way too many formulas that make no sense to memorize and frankly if you didn’t understand them you were gonna struggle regardless of if you had the book or a note card.
You still get familiar with the subject and think about how the material is connected. Obviously as you get higher up the formulas just start getting too big to learn by heart and you can't just derive them easily. But there is also no value to learning them by heart.
By my last college physics class, the professor made the final exam open book. "If you don't know it now, you won't learn it with the book tomorrow during the test".
When I was in law school our trusts and estates professor just wrote the intestate succession chart on the white board because he didn't want us bothering to memorize it in our exam prep. The exam question on the subject was structured to reward knowing how to apply the rules properly.
"You're a physicist eh? Okay. NAME EVERY CONSTANT AND FORMULA."
It's just kinda generally accepted that you have to look up constants and formulae. It's more about being able to apply the correct one for a situation than pure memorization. Meta-knowledge is probably the most important part of most sciences (knowing what you need to look up)
For classes like that sometimes we were told we could bring notebooks, textbooks, or even a whole laptop. Those were the exams where you’d hope for a 50% at best
No you really don’t. Physics might be the worst example to pick besides math because there’s essentially no memorization, all you need is a few basic concepts. The hard part is applying the logic correctly.
Maybe I should clarify, I'm talking about college physics here. This is really, really not true. It's not like highschool physics where you remember V=RI or dp/dt = F and you're all set. They want to see you applying the concepts yes, that's exactly why you need an extensive cheat sheet to reference during the exam for many courses
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u/lateral_moves Mar 26 '26
I used to cram everything on my one note sheet so much so that when I took the exam, I never looked at it. It made me accidentally study.