Exam tips for Dummies

Now that the exams are done, the grades added, and the new block of courses has started, I think it is time to reflect. Not on the grades, but on your (read students) innovative abilities to cheat. Let me be clear. I absolutely do not intend to encourage or praise fraud. But I also believe that reading a few examples of how not to do it can give you valuable insights.

Look, we (read teachers) are ordinary human beings too. We too have had to get through exams. And speaking for myself, they were nerve-racking and, on average, for each exam I had to go to the toilet three to five times. And yes, then too there was a ban on bringing your mobile phone. So if we see that you have a mobile phone in your trouser pocket after going to the toilet, an ‘oops, I forgot’ is not a valid reason to not note you down as cheating. You must know that by now surely. Apart from that, should you have smuggled it in, you should know that we can see when you last logged in on Brightspace. So if you check the lecture slides while in the toilet, know that this defeats the purpose.

‘Ooops, I forgot’ is not a valid reason to not note you down as cheating

And a golden tip: know who the teacher is! A colleague addressed a student 15 minutes before the latter’s exam. The student had pencilled all sorts of terms and definitions from his lecture slides on his arm. My colleague recognised their own slides. But the student did not recognise his very own teacher so that was a surprise at the start of the exam.

And lastly, if you are caught and decide to email an apology to your teacher, don’t forget to remove ‘[Your Name]’, ‘[Teacher’s Name]’, and ‘[Course Name]’ from your ChatGPT generated grovelling message. Surprisingly, this comes across as a little less personal and pleasant.

But, as I said, we too are only human. Of course I can’t speak for all teachers, but I think that there are a few who have also cheated a bit. We used to not only use our graphing calculators for games, but also for calculations, plotting graphs, or to save ‘notes’. This last one in particular was perfect to make cheat sheets. That said, using the ‘notes’ successfully did depend on a level of subtlety and creativity. You needed to work strategically and selectively. For example, using a graphing calculator in biology drew a lot of attention and you needed to save your ‘notes’ using names like ‘Snake 4’ or ‘Space Invaders’. A little understanding and customisation thus helped with successful use.

Looking at these tips, I recommend that you ‘simply’ learn the material. This usually works out well for exams. And should you still want to handle exams differently, this is the master tip: it is not specified anywhere that it is forbidden to take a graphing calculator to the toilet.