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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.
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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.
My sister in law had a medical boards exam where the top 80 % succeed and the bottom 20% fail -- regardless on how much you actually know or how well you did. They just limit how many people can become doctors.
Straight up bottom of the barrel idiocy.
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.
You can lead a horse to water...
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 âlearn the metric, not the materialâ,, 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.