We like professors who give us the luxury of spilling everything in the book, the lecture slides and our brain on an A4 page. Students compete to have the nicest looking most organized cheat sheet, and people like me will try to squeeze every letter, and every word onto the sheet thinking that this is what is going to save me on exam day.
The good news is we may have this luxury; the sad news is that we are just wasting our time. I sometimes wonder if you are in a business meeting trying to close a deal, will you carry a cheat sheet with you. What if you are designing a bridge, do you need a formula sheet that the professor will allow you to use? It is a pity that we need to go through this in what we call the information age, when everything is readily available to you on Wikipedia. Even professors who criticize the education system, they fall in this trap. Others will fall in a trap that is even worst, memorize the formulas, and memorize theories and definitions. Today, the memory chip on your phone can probably carry more information than your brain can. No wonder why we no longer memorized phone numbers. If there is a solution available to make life more convenient, then why waste energy and time on activities that do not add value to you. Whenever I see students at graduate level, meaning that they are at least managers or directors filling a cheat sheet, I wonder how this will help them to become better leaders in the future.
Of course, I love the cheat sheets, at least, I don’t need to memorize stuff, but what is wrong with having access to any resource you want to use, the Internet, your book, or even your friend. After all, this is what you will do in the real world, when you need information or help with something, The answer, is simple, it is because of a problem that we have created, and are trying to solve with another problem. This problem is the exam. Yes, it may look like I am whining about everything, but I ask the same question, how will these exams make you a better leader or manager. They will definitely not. Exams are more like simulation games with predetermined answers or at least they guide your thinking to a predetermined path, and therefore you will need the cheat sheet, or in the worst case memorize stuff you will forget 10 minutes after you walk out of the exam. Rather than designing a better way of training the leaders of the future, we design exams that test our memory, and not how we apply knowledge. It is indeed a challenge to come up with a solution, but if for centuries we failed to find one, then does not this mean that the whole education system is wrong. We are told that we need to be creative and innovative, but the sector that is the least innovative today is probably education. So the question is, how can we create a revolution in education when the same people will run it for years and years, and will clone more people like them to continue this process. In fact, standards of excellence have been created by the same people, so the whole market follows these standards, accreditations, rankings, and the almost fake seal of quality. I guess it will take a lot of time before we see real change!