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.
me
But then the exam is about practical application instead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
