Transcript
A bluesky post by hyperspace, @thehyyyype.bsky.social, saying "Cheating on an exam by memorizing everything the professor taught in advance so I can easily answer all the questions. The post was made on January 24th, 2025 at 9:31 PM.
We used to be allowed to bring one A4 piece of paper with handwritten notes to most exams at uni. I always crammed them with notes, but very rarely were they more than my emotional support notes. Turns out that writing these notes the night before is a pretty good way to reinforce all the knowledge you need for the test.
The only big exception was game theory. I was studying a master data science (as part of computer science) and game theory was a course from the mathematics master. That was the hardest fought 7/10 of my life. Turns out math is taught very differently to math students than comp sci students.
Cheating on exams by gaining a deeper understanding of the material so you can just rederive the answers during the exam.
Cheating on the prostate exam by…
I got all the way through a B.s. in engineering without taking notes or studying. If someone explains something to me, especially visually, I can just remember that. Except just pure memorization of stuff so I 100% cheated on history and languages.
Consider yourself skilled. Or neurodivergant.
Yes, neurodivergence is when you can remember things or have interests
Neurodivergence can mean different things. Its not a monolith.
This but unironically
Probably 50/50
In one notoriously hard class, my professor would post practice exams from previous years.
It turned out he also basically reused exam questions from previous years, so doing these practice exams basically landed me a perfect score in a class where the exam average usually hovered around 60%.
My peers, who refused to do the practice exams, even after I repeatedly told them of their existence and using them as my study method, accused me of cheating because I practiced using the practice exams the teacher posted with the explicit purpose of having us practice with them.
I think they were just mad I ruined the curve.
That curve system they have in some countries is pretty messed up, rather than just judging people on how well they have learnt the curriculum.
My sister in law had a medical boards exam where the top 80 % succeed and the bottom 20% fail – regardless on how much you actually know or how well you did. They just limit how many people can become doctors.
Straight up bottom of the barrel idiocy.
I’ve seen something similar in middle school. Except that the teacher shown us the exact exams we were about to have. And also the answers. He was pretty desperate, but it didn’t work either.
You can lead a horse to water…
Even if the professor doesn’t provide them, you need to socialize around to find which frat or sorority has filing cabinets (or digital scans, I guess nowadays) of old exams. And if word gets around that you did well on tests, be prepared to be treated out and schmoozed by younger students to give them old exams and problem sets from your recently completed course. Unfortunately, studying for exams honestly (becoming educable in the subject by learning the principles) does not pay off unless the exam creator is creating problem sets from scratch. Perversely, with this degree-mill mentality of “learn the metric, not the material”, you should avoid new professors who are more likely to be creating their own teaching materials even though the whole point of academia is to create social connections with precious generations of researchers to push science and humanities forward.
Honestly, I wish there were less roundabout ways than exams to funnel those who are only interested in getting a certification from those genuinely interested in preserving and building our civilization’s knowledge.
To anyone reading this please don’t do this. By cheating by memorizing you ruin everything for those of us who spent minutes writing the answers on the label of our drinking flask and making it look like the ingredients.
This is how my career as graphic designer started.
That label: “Add drop shadow”
Nice! All my exams in university included an announcement that all water bottles must be clear and free of labels. No other food or drinks permitted.
In middle school and high school I specifically remember being told the standardized math and science tests would have problems like we’d never seen before, but if you knew the concepts well, you could answer them.
This was not popular for a lot of people :/
But then the exam is about practical application instead.
I know it’s said jokingly, but the best instructors I’ve ever had in things like math and science were the ones that explained WHY things were useful.
Apply directly to the forehead
HEAD ON
me
