I once caught an 11th-grader who snuck a cheat sheet into the final exam.
At first, he tried to shuffle it under some scratch paper. When I cornered him, he shifted tactics. “It’s my page of equations,” he told me. “Aren’t we allowed a formula sheet? The physics teacher lets us.” Nice try, but no dice. The principal and I rejected his alibi and hung a fat zero on his final exam. That dropped his precalculus grade down from a B+ to a D+. It lingered like a purple bruise on his college applications.
Looking back, I have to ask myself: Why didn’t I allow a formula sheet? Cheat sheets aim to substitute for memorization, and I hate it when my students memorize things.
… What separates memorization from learning is a sense of meaning. When you memorize a fact, it’s arbitrary, interchangeable—it makes no difference to you whether sine of π/2 is one, zero, or a million. But when you learn a fact, it’s bound to others by a web of logic. It could be no other way.
Ben Orlin, <a href=”http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/when-memorization-gets-in-the-way-of-learning/279425/”>When Memorization Gets in the Way of Learning</a>, <cite>The Atlantic</cite>, 9 September 2013