[btoptical]

Yep at Univ. of Rochester as physics undergrads we were often allowed a single sheet of paper with anything on it (we were told no microfiche!). I did a few open book exams but still made the "cheat" sheet. We all spent a great deal of time preparing that sheet. You had to study to really know what to put on the sheet. I often found that I did not need the sheet in the actual exam because the process of preparing it helped to bring the concepts forward in my mind.

In grad school as classes got more difficult, we had take home exams even. I always dreaded these because they were substantially more difficult than a regular exam. Generally if you didn't have the concepts down, having an entire library at your disposal was not helpful in that case.

[snogglethorpe]

The "cheat sheet" thing was common at my university too.

It often turned into an exercise in finding the extreme bottom limit to how small one could write (and turned me into a fan of Pilot Hi-Tec 0.25mm pens!), so I always wondered how carefully considered the limitation to one sheet was... did they actually try out different limits and choose the one that worked best?

More limitation forces students to think about what they're including instead of just copying the textbook onto paper, but even a slight relaxation to 4-5 pieces of paper would have really helped in many cases, and allowed us to focus more on the material and less on the physical chore of preparation...

[pdkl95]

The engineering dept at UCDavis went well beyond a single page, and usually allowed anything you wanted as long as it was print-only, book included. (nothing electronic or networked, obviously)

The idea was 1) in the real world, you have reference material which you should know how to use, and 2) test length did NOT include any extra time to look things up.

If you knew the material and just needed a quick check of some detail, you could look it up without any problem because you didn't have to search. On the other hand, if you were trying to teach yourself some concept during the test, the wasted time would probably impact how much of the test you were able to complete.

I liked that system - it seemed rather generous coming from "nothing allowed" tests in earlier schooling, and it had a side benefit of reducing the number of profs that badly reused exam questions or lazily used textbook-provided questions.

/* Yes, this policy caused some of us to find the one printer on campus that printed on A3 paper with duplex support, so we could print an electronic-only reference book at 24 pages/sheet (if I remember correctly...) */

[jackvalentine]

My university was the same for most math classes, but some allowed printed notes.

Creating a LaTeX template that fits everything on to the sheet was an amazing time saver.

[afafsd]

One maths class we were only warned that we had to use Euclidean paper.

I did great in exams with cheat sheets, but poorly in the few truly "open book" exams, because I didn't know how to properly prepare for an open book exam. My silly undergrad brain thought "Woohoo, open book, I guess I don't have to study all this stuff, I can just look it up when I get there" which led to two hours of feverishly flipping back and forth in the book.

[WalterBright]

Yeah, big mistake thinking open book means one doesn't have to study. I know only one guy (Hal Finney) who could learn the material during an exam :-) As I wrote elsewhere, Hal was one scary smart dude.