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.
There’s an episode of Boy Meets World where this is the plot.
I like to go in blind. At least I have my integrity.
I had a professor who in the last lecture gave us the list of all the questions he had (something like 170) and from which he would pick some subset.
He had genuinely managed to ask about pretty much everything in the course, so this really was more of a check-list of knowledge that we were supposed to have. As such it was really nice!
My sister had an old teacher who was immune to this:
- “Yes we didn’t get to that chapter but it was in the book so YOUR FAULT.”
- “I didn’t mention it because it’s obvious to a person with half a brain.”
- “I couldn’t read your handwriting.”
- “Your answer solved the problem but didn’t include the term I was looking for. ‘Area under the curve’ is not how you say ‘integral’.”
- “That was a stupid question. Next quiz ends 1 minute early.”
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…
One of the comments is not like the others
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.
I have a similar hack for never getting a speeding ticket. There are these signs next to the road with large numbers on them. Turns out there is a glitch in speed cameras that results in them not being able to take your picture if you keep your speed below that number. You can tell your own speed on the big dial behind the steering wheel.
So when you see a sign, make sure the stick thing in the dial behind the wheel points to a lower number than was on the sign. boom, never get a speeding ticket ever again.
People are backed up behind me and honking, it’s a 2 lane road, what do?
Turn up the radio.
Hope you don’t live in the US where there’s a solid chance someone swerves around you and then pulls a gun on you.
LMAOOO BRILLIANT. I’m going to use it everytime
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.
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.
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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 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 :/
Isn’t that how exams are always supposed to be done?
1/3 is testing knowledge alone, 1/3 is testing your ability to apply this knowledge to problems and 1/3 is testing your ability to transfer your knowledge to new contexts.
Example for maths:
Knowledge: Provide the formula to solve any quadratic equation.
Apply knowledge: Solve this quadratic equation: […]
Transfer knowledge: [Some long text problem requiring you to translate it into mathematical terms and then solve it]
I guess “how exams are supposed to be done” is a pedagogy question, or “what is the best way to teach?” As I understand it, pedagogy might be more popularly known in Europe and more top-down and behind the scenes in USA.
I don’t know about the current state of pedagogy, but it makes sense to me that you’d want to test something like these categories.
I’ve had plenty of tests though where the type of problems on the exam were the same type we practiced, for the whole test.
From your last example, if you’ve already practiced many examples of [some long text problem] in a common format, it might not be a new context to you.
The middle school/high school tests I was talking about had entirely different kinds of problems we had never seen before, but where if you knew the concepts well, you could make the connection to how to solve them.
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
