Taking paper with info into an exam.

All of my uni exams were open book (computing - Bath Uni)

By open book I mean full access to any notes you'd saved on your computer home drive, full access to the internet, books, papers, whatever. The only thing you weren't allowed was to talk to other people, e.g. classmates, forums, messenger programs.

In some ways I think this actually makes the exam harder, since the questions are structured in such a way that you aren't just required to show you can memorise data by reeling off facts/equations, you're actually required to demonstrate your understanding of the subject.

Think about it this way. Your education is supposed to prepare you to go into work. At what point during your work career would you be required to perform a task under exam conditions? You'd always research any solutions/problems before implementing them, so being allowed to do this in an exam makes sense.
 
Do it.

Exams where you're allowed material such as notes the markers take this into account and mark accordingly. So you will be marked on the basis that you had some external aids to help you during the exam. You won't get any extra marks or looked upon favourably if you don't. Also the exams are made a bit more difficult to factor the advantage of having notes in. You're only hindering yourself.

The above info is based on one of my first year Law tests where we were given the question a month before so we were allowed to prepare but had to do it without any aid during the exam.

Exams are not preparation for other exams. Revision is. Take every step as it comes. Don't start looking to far ahead.
 
Well I've got a page of information so far, I've just noted down short descriptions of some points and the main points of other things.

Haggisman, how on earth did you have access to your computer home drive?? Was the exam done on your own computer or laptop??
 
I had an exam in my final uni semester that included a computer based question (debugging a graphics render's source code) where we had access to notes that we had on our home drive. Glad I had access to them as the fix was a DirectX option that has lots of very similar named choices that I couldn't remember the right one from.

Make all the notes you can if you are permitted to :)
 
willhub said:
I think this is a bad idea, since you cannot do this in uni,.
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oh but you can...


especially in first year. ive had lots of i open book exams and exams where your allowed one hand written A4 sheet


ive wrote full examples and answers on them before then had near identical questions come up. massive timesaver
 
All you got to do in GCSE exams nowadays is write your name correctly and get a pass. I'm hoping you didn't take a note of how to spell your name into the exam room.

What ever happened to O levels and A levels and the thickos doing GCE's.
 
Duke said:
You can take paper with answers on it in with you? Wtf?
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My thoughts exactly.
What a ****ing joke of an education system.

It should be to educate you, not teach you how to pass a bloody exam (pee now boiling)



p.s. take the notes..
 
digipeep said:
All you got to do in GCSE exams nowadays is write your name correctly and get a pass. I'm hoping you didn't take a note of how to spell your name into the exam room.

What ever happened to O levels and A levels and the thickos doing GCE's.
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We couldn't possibly have Big Jonny being smarter than little Jonny.
That would be unfair..

:rolleyes:
 
We had a few cheat sheet allowed papers whilst at uni. What it means is they no longer test if you know something i.e. an equation and its basic application. They test to see if you can apply the equation to a more complex question that may draw on multiple sections of the taught material.

I hated them with a passion.
 
What suprises me is how so many people are completely unaware of open book exams and treat them as some sort of dumbing down exercise.
 
At this point it doesn't matter what you might do at university in terms of exams, you only need to pass the exam in front of you so unless you've got some masochistic tendencies and want to make the exam much more needlessly difficult than it needs to be then take in the notes that you're allowed. As suggested you could choose not to look at them unless necessary but that's up to you, not taking them in the first instance would be somewhat foolhardy though.
 
I need to get a merit as well, or Uni won't accept me. Have to pass Key Skills Communication level 2 aswell, allthough passed 3 practice tests in a row so pretty confident about that one.
 
Like others have said, do it!. I'd be slightly embarrassed if I never took the notes in with me and failed, wouldn't you ?
 
You could take in a clear pencil case, full of pens, thus making it not so clear and then fill it full of tiny crib notes. At least that's what one girl did in an exam I was in at my final year of uni.

She did get caught, and one of the examiners tipped it all out on her desk!
 
RDM said:
What suprises me is how so many people are completely unaware of open book exams and treat them as some sort of dumbing down exercise.
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Agreed. This is the ignorance of the 'last' generation; refusing to believe that so many people could possibly be reaching their standards.

The fact is, exams are and have always been - broken. They're just slightly less broken now. Passing an exam or a TCA or coursework is not about memorising a semester's worth of material; something that will never be expected of you in the real world. Passing the exam is about forcing yourself to grasp a greater understanding of the material. Open book/read paper exams are especially clever as they encourage the use of recall via the third person perspective of the book/sheet at the time it was being written/read.

The fact is, people want this generation of students to be as miserable as they were.
 
Tigjaw said:
Agreed. This is the ignorance of the 'last' generation; refusing to believe that so many people could possibly be reaching their standards.

The fact is, exams are and have always been - broken. They're just slightly less broken now. Passing an exam or a TCA or coursework is not about memorising a semester's worth of material; something that will never be expected of you in the real world. Passing the exam is about forcing yourself to grasp a greater understanding of the material. Open book/read paper exams are especially clever as they encourage the use of recall via the third person perspective of the book/sheet at the time it was being written/read.

The fact is, people want this generation of students to be as miserable as they were.
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spot on


the exams ive done with 'cheat sheets' have been about applying the knowledge and knowing what your on about. not just memorising equations that will never be used in the real world anymore.
 
my last exam at uni this year was open book, we were allowed to bring any textbook and written or printed notes in with us as long as they were relevant.

i can't say that they made the exam any easier, but they simply allowed me to reference the small but important multitudinous details which that module was plagued with.

for example, in a question that might be along the lines of "What is the purpose of the program NetCat", if you didn't have notes/textbooks with you, you'd just have to give a sort of, "weeeel, it does this that and the other, which might be bad because"

but with notes from the books, you could say:
"if running netcat with the -n -x -p 2262 options, then etc etc etc will be possible, this is a security concern because x y z." which is a much more relevant answer.
 
Definitely do it, worry about uni when it comes.

But for now, do whatever is allowed to get the best marks possible!
 
I never had an open book exam. I find the prospect of it very dumbed down. You could teach a monkey to be able to pass that given all the information infront of you.

Though i guess this is the modern era where information management is part of the game??

The only "cheat sheet" i had was a tiny rubber with a ton of microscopically drawn equations on it in a 0.1mm mapping pen :O

We had access to past papers, which gave us an idea of what we could expect then i focused the bulk of my reading and revision around the most likely questions to come up.

It was a total buzz when 3 of the 4 came up that you had utterly hammered the weeks before ( when i mean week i mean 12h and no sleep at all but am tying to look professional)
 
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