Right, right. That’s why I don’t need a hard drive or cloud computing account for my computer. All I need is a fast processor. No keyboard needed, either. Just a sweet, fast processor.
I think what you say is true to a degree, but having facts in your brain to analyze and process is part of being smart. Quickly googled knowledge can be useful, but isn’t deep knowledge or understanding - it is superficial. You can debate which facts are useful to have memorized,…which is a whole different issue.
I remember a dumb 80’s sitcom where a student who was trying to cheat on a tests kept getting foiled at every attempt. Finally he came upon a new foolproof way to “cheat” on an upcoming test: actually read the material the night before and remember the information in his head! Ha! Worked like a charm!
What’s the point? Once you allow them to take one of these cards, there is little difference between this and someone whose writing takes up half the area.
The trick is is write questions so that these things aren’t useful. (or at least not simply regurgitating what is on the card.)
In the computing paradigm, I consider the brain a RAM. Limited space, fast access. (And somewhat unreliable storage as we tend to forget and - worse - misremember, but that’s a different problematic.) Plus an indexing system, the structure.
The structure of the problematics, with some rough idea about the related facts, is the most important part. The facts themselves, if you are aware of their significance and can localize them fast, are easily “swapped in” from external media. Just look and see. As long as you know enough to know what to look for, you’re golden.
Memorizing on its own is pretty much worthless. Any computer can do it better. The overall data-handling performance is more important than any of its sub-aspects alone; so offloading the memorizing-heavy part to cheat-sheets or computers is what I consider as entirely permissible.
Memorizing specific literary passages and historical dates by rote is silly, yes, but having come across them at all by doing the reading is important. It’s like being introduced to a large group at a party by individual names — you don’t know ahead of time which of them you’re going to need to remember and which you’re never even going to interact with. You don’t know whether it’s Great Expectations or Dombey and Son that will turn out to be cultural references any reasonably well-educated person is expected to have a basic grasp of; Richard II or Richard III; A.D. 1066 or 1091.
Using a crib sheet for timelines and who begat whom is fine, rewording Cliff’s Notes for essays because you didn’t read the book is not.
/me puts Dombey and Son on his library list.
If you need to have facts in your brain rather than on the Internet in order to be smart, then you also need those facts in your brain to pass well-structured exams which test if you’re smart. It’s therefore no help to you to have Internet access during the exam, and so it might as well be allowed.
Such a rule on crib cards sounds like a blatant breach of the ADA – people with better eyesight (i.e. less disabled) can write smaller and fit more on the card. You need a character limit, not a size limit, with the card allowed to be as big as it needs to be to fit in that many characters. Which would incidentally make this ingenious idea completely pointless.
Not a good example for me. I am too lousy with names, in such scenario I forget them all. 
(Usually I pick someone whom I know already and can remember/recognize to be my “liaison officer” who tells me who is who when I need it. And yes, I am waiting for face-recognizing/annotating augmented reality systems, rather impatiently.)
Once it is clear what it will be, read it. Or read the Cliff’s Notes version, three quarters of other people can be expected to be doing it the same way anyway.
And these days the pop culture references are mostly TV or movies, for better or worse, so nothing lost anyway.
And the other people don’t read my engineering books (Norman P. Lieberman - Troubleshooting process operations, stumbled over a PDF somewhere in Russia and reading it now, it’s quite a page turner if you’re into petrochemistry) so I won’t read their boring stuff, and we’ll get even, no hard feelings.
And, honestly, you can get more day to day use of “Anthony E Hargreaves - Chemical Formulation - An Overview of Surfactant Based Chemical Preparations Used in Everyday Life” than from “Richard III”. And as a free bonus it is more fun.
I didn’t read many books I was supposed to. I usually took a taste, they were boring and of no value, so I read something better instead (e.g. steel refining, or plastics processing, or molecular genetics…, things still handy to me now) and did the “high lit” notes by doing editor service (grammar errors catching, I have a “this looks wrong” kind of language sense) for several classmates (was a great way to get THEM to beg ME to read their notes, which automated the process of getting their notes to me) and compiling their notes into my own. I was never even suspected, as my notes were always uniquely worded and never had merely a subset of info of a single other text. Every book has an opportunity cost - all the other books you can’t read at the same time, so prioritizing is recommended.
…thinking about that, it’s ages since I read a book that did not have at least a dozen pages of notes and references at the end… Not sure if it is good or bad, but not caring particularly much…
And, honestly, you can get more day to day use of “Anthony E Hargreaves -
Chemical Formulation - An Overview of Surfactant Based Chemical
Preparations Used in Everyday Life” than from “Richard III”. And as a
free bonus it is more fun.
Uh… “My kingdom for a horse” by itself turns Anthony Hargreaves’ entire life work into dust as far as cultural currency goes. Also the association to Shakespeare…
Saying you don’t enjoy reading those things (or it sounds like anything without a direct practical application) is fine. But you can bet that a large subsection of the population does not hold the same beliefs as you.
Yes I opened an account just to respond to that small quote… Because whoa.
I know someone who once did this with “invisible ink” (he actually bought UV ink-jet cartridges off ebay so he could print it out directly with a really tiny font) and a UV LED hidden in an eraser.
If you don’t care that you’re ignoring wide swaths of insight into the human condition, how we got to where we are, why are people acting so damned irrationally, etc., that’s fine for you — you’re an adult and you can make that decision for yourself. But it’s not a good model for general pre-adult pedagogy.
of course I don’t know but I bet that student probably did study, they had notes and I suppose putting those notes together in that way amounted to a form of studying ( handwriting something involves reading it after all) and I bet they probably studied some stuff that they didn’t write down, since it really does look like notes meant to job the memory - just more extensive notes than other peoples.
Good on ya, mate. I just memorized them. No licking.
Pretty clever student! The only thing that could have been more clever than the red/blue masking would be if he made a hypercard so he could write on both sides.
[quote=“shaddack, post:28, topic:48656”]
Not a good example for me. I am too lousy with names, in such scenario I forget them all. 
(Usually I pick someone whom I know already and can remember/recognize to be my “liaison officer” who tells me who is who when I need it. And yes, I am waiting for face-recognizing/annotating augmented reality systems, rather impatiently.)
I’m pretty bad with names, too, even if it’s just one person. Recently when introduced to a new person, within the first five minutes I had to ask her to remind me of her name about five times. Each time I prefaced it with, “I’m being completely serious. I am not joking.” No need for a liaison officer.
I too spent much time cramming as much information as possible onto crib sheets, ended up with considerable empty space in the end, and found the cramming to be useful studying exercise in itself. I keep meaning to dig up those sheets and scan them; I was rather pleased with my efforts at the time.
…But they can hardly compare with one of my favorite posters, a little piece called “The Nut Cracker”, which I am pleased to see has surfaced on Reddit.
http://imgur.com/9ciya
I’m sorry, I just had to point out that there are four DNA base pairs, and you have to remember which pairs with which. Then there’s RNA which has a fifth base pair, since it uses Uracil instead of Thymine. Ok done geeking out.
You use the blue card, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You use the red card, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.
Jesus wept.
What’s the goddamned point of being a chemist or industrial engineer if you’re never going to actually spend any time being human? We’ll just swap you out with a machine some afternoon that doesn’t give a damn why humanity is worth doing something for. There’s more to life than pop culture references.
Well, I for one, welcome thoughts like this with open arms.
