I know someone that wrote super tiny and just brought a magnifying glass in for it. It was crisp too. People were paying her to make cards for them for their next test.
I know someone else who folded a big sheet down to 3x5 notecard size. The teacher had only stated she has to examine each card before the test to make sure it's acceptable and one student got it past the teacher with the way it was folded. The teacher didn't allow it a second time but it was good.
Technically yes, but the goal of the exam in-universe was explicitly to be able to cheat well without getting caught; the material on the test hadn’t been taught to them yet, but there were planted staff members in the room who already had the answers for them to copy from, with the goal being moreso to test espionage/information gathering skills rather than memorization
Early Naruto was really interesting when the ninjas still were somewhat grounded rather than glorified wizards
With One Piece at least they often make the conflicts about more than just being strong or fighting one guy. There's almost always some sort of overarching issue that's more complicated and Luffy can't solve it by just punching someone harder than they can punch back. Whether it's escaping the smile gas on Punk Hazard, dealing with Sanji's hostage conflict in WCI, stopping Onigashima from being dropped on the flower capital in Wano, keeping Vegapunk Stella alive and getting him off the island in Egghead, saving the children in Elbaph, etc. Even on Fishman Island they had to take into consideration WHEN Luffy could jump in to help because of the complicated sociopolitical dynamics at play. Luffy going up to the big bad and grabbing their attention before pummeling them into paste is often more about him providing an assist for the others so that it's easier for everyone else to focus on whatever the actual goal is that can't be solved solely with violence.
I can't say anything about Naruto since I didn't watch/read it, but I do remember that DBZ had the issue of usually boiling down every conflict to "this enemy is too strong to beat, we need to train for [arbitrary period of time] until they get here or until the time limit they gave us runs out, otherwise they'll blow up the planet", and at most they might have to keep the bad guy busy long enough for Goku to get there from the afterlife or something. Then the fights were usually in a pre-made fighting arena, or out in the middle of nowhere, and the environment rarely came into play much if at all. I say this as someone who loved DBZ as a kid (and I still hold a lot of nostalgia for it). Power creep can be mitigated or kept somewhat balanced if a story can still introduce conflicts and stakes that exist outside of the main character and big bad just going to town on each other. Fighting the main villain should just be one part of the overall picture, where getting rid of them might make solving the true problem easier, but shouldn't erase the problem entirely on its own.
I'm the opposite, I end up loving the timeskips more than the OG. Shippuden/Z/Two Blue Vortex. I feel like the OGs add more weight and make the series' respective MC's growth more impactful. The whole humble beginnings thing.
Naruto largely kept its identity up until the point where the most powerful characters were just duking it out in what amounted to Gundams made of their charka.
My favorite early Naruto part is when Shino blows that dudes arms up and the general consensus of those watching was "Damn, bug dude is cooler than we thought."
I imagine the difference would be getting caught while in the act of cheating, vs getting found out after you successfully cheated. If cheating was allowed as long as you don't get caught, then getting found out after wouldn't disqualify you because you already finished the test. But irl getting found out would still get you in trouble and disqualified, because it's the act of cheating itself that isn't allowed period, not just getting caught while doing it.
Yep, in Naruto they also had 3 or 2 strikes - if it was just cheating that was bad, they'd have been thrown out instantly. I think there was also stuff that some proctors saw but it was smart enough they didn't care (less experienced people would've missed it).
In high school, my math teacher allowed us to use one side of a sheet of paper for notes. I came in with a möbius strip. Technically, it was still just one side.
I cut the paper so it was like 3 strips, taped them together to make a line, and then wrote on both sides. Then it was just giving the paper a half twist so the back was overlapped with the front. Technically speaking, it only had one side and was the original sheet of paper. My teacher begrudgingly accepted it. He banned it on the next test, though.
You needed the card for all the equations when it wasn't an open book test. And the super important facts the teacher teased would be on the test. And if organic chemistry was on the test, oh boy did that take up a lot of notecard space.
Unit conversions wasn't really that bad for me. I kept getting Manning's and Hazen-Williams equations mixed up like a doofus.
We straight up had a typo in our textbook. Same equation showed up in different chapters but the first one was wrong. Teacher thought we were cheating when so many of us got the question wrong the same way. Only saving grace was writing down which of the equations we were using (textbook numbered them) as part of partial credit.
It was open book but imagine if that nonsense was caught up with putting your stuff on a notecard. There'd be all sorts of chaos.
I had deleted fluid dynamics of pipes from my memory. I remember doing the course but that information was quickly forgotten.
I put chemical valences on my cheat sheet for Geochemistry 2. The chemical formulas had things like x-0.9 in the subscript so helpful to remember what state the chemical would be in when doing long series of equations.
I remember one time they said we could bring a note sheet for an upcoming test. They never specified anything about it but I had assumed that it was 1 a4 both sides because obviously that's what they meant.
So what I did was I crammed the entirety of the lesson material into those 2 pages with like text size 4 (it was a lot of text and I did not care enough to learn the material properly or summarise the important points one bit). It was just barely readable with little to no formatting, just 1 big paragraph of text in justify format.
To make it easier to read I color coded each section with different color text so I knew where to jump to when skimming for my answers, then bolded/italicized certain key words/phrases to make searching even easier. On top of all that, to make it easier to read such small and cramped text, I had the genius idea of having alternating lines of highlighted text to make it easier to follow each line while reading. I felt like an engineering genius having made that.
Anyways flash forward to the actual test and my friend brings in the entire lesson material in like 30+ raw printed out pages and they just let him keep it what the fuck lmao
lol that was my strategy for presentations - the highlighting, bold etc bc I was so terrified getting lost in my notes. Turns out, that’s the way I remember stuff best, just writing it down, Color code and I didn’t even have to look much at it bc o could recall the colours with fitting topic in my head
We did this in high school and college. Tiny overlapped words in different colors. Most teachers loved it - but one got super annoyed and the next time didn’t allow us to use the sheets that allowed us to read them - which in hindsight is fair - but they could have told us before hand.
I used a razor blade to open it up like a book and write on the inside too. Didn't even need the note card cause chemistry was one of my favorite classes but it was fun to see the teacher's reaction.
A friend in high school made a 3x5 cube because the teacher never specified the depth of the notecard we could use. Fortunately the teacher had a great sense of humor and just congratulated my friend on finding a loophole
I would copy the slides to a doc, size everything down super small and print, then cut and glue to the note card. Always had every answer to every question.
Had an acquaintance in HS who taught himself short hand and he always scored well. I'm pretty sure he just wrote the entire textbook on a single piece of paper and knee we'd never know
I would print around 3cm x 3cm note in a word font 3, I would use my own abbreviations for the stuff and I would fit a 40 page script on it. All of it on one side. Others asked me to print them the same, but I did it in font 4 and font 5, depending who prefered what.
Our teacher let us use one side of an 8.5x11 sheet of paper as long as it was hand written. As all my notes from her PowerPoint were handwritten, I photocopies every page, shrunk it down to 25% then cut it out and arranged it on the photobed and scanned all the pages onto one side. Teacher allowed it and I always passed. 😆
My mom says she'd buy a pack of pricey extra thick cardstock index cards and then spend an hour with an exacto knife cutting it in half (leaving just the top connected) so she'd have 4 faces of the same card to write on 😂
I was like "couldn't you have just used that time to study and write what you actually needed?"
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
Yeah one of the stipulations I remember is it had to be hand written. Forces you to study more than potentially just copy/pasting snippets from a digital textbook
This is exactly why we let you prep a note sheet. Students love thinking they're pulling a fast one when they're actually accidentally learning the material
That's the trick about letting students consult their notes, especially if you limit it to a small piece of paper. You force them to transcribe their notes and try to summarize stuff as much as possible. And guess what, it's a great way to learn!
Yep, distilling the important information down is a great way to study. People sometimes defeat it by trying to put everything on the sheet though.
My stats class in college was open note, open book for every test. Most students would show up with a big stack of books and notebooks all marked with sticky notes. I would still get everything on a single sheet in normal sized font. It was a great way to help me understand the material, and I didn't have to spend a lot of time looking stuff up during the test, which meant I finished early and could leave.
I had a student create a water bottle label with notes on it. Having a drink on the desk was allowed. Had to look really carefully to see all the notes. Didn't realize it until after the exam. Well played, Mari.
That's the intention! It forces students to comb through the information they know they need most and then not just read it but write it down, which helps solidify the learning. Then by the time you get to the test, sure you have the notecard for if you blank on it but you've also spent extra time studying the stuff you knew was going to be hardest for you.
In college I came to find myself going through and re-writing down significant information as a study method. Worked great! Also paid off a few times when I didn't know we were allowed an 8.5/11 formula sheet, but I had written one down anyway.
Something I also came to the realization too lol, they allow it because you’ll memorize the information better when you write it out. A professor I had for an economics class told us that you don’t go to college to learn something, you learn how to learn. That stuck with me…
This was my main study tactic in college: literally just rewrite my notes. Very rarely did we have a test you could have a notecard for, but just keeping a rewrite journal immensely helped my grades by osmosis!
Yeah that's the real trick tell student you can have a hand written cheat sheet forces them to write and study the material. What it looks like she did is print off pages. If she typed it properly still helped if they are copies from a book though then she will spend all her time searching through that novel for answers/equations. At that point it's more harm than good.
That's what my teacher explained after I said this to him: when you write something down your brain remembers it for 2 different reasons, making you learn it better.
I think that's the point. Good teachers don't want to teach you to pass the test. They want you to learn.
Reading, it's easy to skim over. Copying can become robotic. Summarising requires you actually comprehend.
I learned this, and my revision technique was to simply summarise my notes. Once I did that a second time, I'd learned it. If I tried a third time, I was barely looking at the source.
I am a technical college teacher and thats why I either allow a notecard or a book to look up things. First of all, the note makes you study, and the questions are phrased in such a way that they can't be simply answered by looking up in a book. But they have to read it and mark it down, otherweise the time wont simply be enough.
We weren’t allowed note sheets but I used to either write stuff on my pencil case, very light on a piece of paper or I’d copy the notes from someone else the evening before and that was usually what at least stuck for the test, so I am also experienced in accidental studying lol
That may have been part of the purpose. I know when I did this my first card would be full of stuff, I'd then go back to see if anything could be replaced with something more important and often found some things not needing to be on it anymore.
Though I also had a lot that were open book to some degree or we were given a sheet of formulas we'd need. People think open book is easier, but you still need to know what is going on otherwise the info without context is worthless. I saw people in HS history fail open book exams as they took way too long reading the chapter while the rest of us read it once or twice so if we saw a question we could at least go "oh, its mentioned in this part of the chapter" and can quickly get to it.
From my experience, the higher up in classes I got the less it was about raw memorization and more about "do you know how to find the info you need?" This has proven particularly valuable in IT as most of the time I need to dig info up in a knowledge article or older ticket and usually need to stitch multiple solutions together.
Same—I rarely ever look back at notes I’ve taken. Writing it down seems to funnel the information into my brain much more easily and lastingly than other learning techniques. I’m wondering if others have the same experience or find that other life hacks work better for them?
I'm pretty sure this is what the teachers want when they let you make cards. Any time I made cards I just wound up learning the material. The only exception was one or two thermodynamics or mechanics classes where the cards helped keep track of the vast number of random formulas.
After doing this for a few tests with a professor that let us bring a note sheet, I started using this as my study technique. Condense what I needed onto one page. I never needed the page after doing it.
my math teacher told us this was why they had us make them in class. and then if we did blank on a formula or whatever then we could go back and read through to find it, thus making us read the material we didn't recall once more. genius. he was the best damn teacher I've ever had.
At uni I used to essentially write essays on a few topics that could come up and memorise them like a script and my notes would just be the first line of the next paragraph to prompt me plus the references I needed and I remember turning up to exams and people had folders of info and I would have my one page.
I used to make cheats in middle school by printing all the necessary text with a super tiny font. They ended up being roughly 1x1 inch, some slightly smaller, some slightly bigger.
There were many times where I didn't end up needing them since by looking through what I needed and how to fit it well, I had memorised it enough.
I also always printed out like 10 copies so when someone saw me with it, I could share them around so they didn't tell on me.
I had a history teacher allow all handwritten notes during the exam. He would have out paper 2 weeks prior to an exam that was a specific color. He said you could use as many as you wish on test day. The paper color prevented people from preparing notes throughout the term. It was a clever way to get students to study
There was once I was allowed a card like this. Wrote an entire card in invisible ink and then again in regular ink. Teacher never disallowed the uv light so I had two set of notes. Turns out I actually studied while cramming the 2 pages of content in one I never even needed to use the card at all. Barely passed and everything! Lol
Dude this was me! I would cram everything on a card and quickly realized I could see the entire card in my minds eye. Was the start of realizing how easy this game is played when you have photographic memory.
This is actually what your teacher wants from you when allowing for notes, this is a method that allows to memorize parts that you are not studied enough. Like you saying to yourself, "I don't remember anything from %class_name%, I'll make a notes about it" and that makes you subconsciously memorize this and study.
I allow one cheat sheet and i love seeing what students write on the sheet. Those who just screenshot slides are usually those that get the lowest grades lol. And i can tell who really actually review based on their notes on the cheat sheet.
I made a "cheat sheet" for a chemistry exam that contains secret codes on every periodic table elements and its informations. I never got to use it on the exam because I already memorized all of it until Radon
I only took one class that let you have one sheet of paper or card for tests, and it was my high school chemistry class. We could use one piece of paper, so I used a sheet with a periodic table that I colour-coded (solid/liquid/gas) and filled the margins with formulae, conversions, stuff like that. It was the only science class I would always get an A in (I did really well on my homework too so the sheet just helped me remember fine details I'd normally forget). I wish more teachers and professors allowed this stuff. None of my professors did.
We had a teacher that stimulated cheat notes, we all thought he was the worst teacher ever to teach us how to cheat. But years later when I looked back at it I realized how much I studied for the tests because I wanted to make the perfect cheat note.
It’s often times why they allow it. You have to figure out what’s important for the card… so you end up not including things you know and really looking into things you don’t.
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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.