Cheat sheet
Encyclopedia
Cheat sheets are so named because they may be used by students without the instructor's knowledge to cheat
Cheating
Cheating refers to the breaking of rules to gain advantage in a competitive situation. The rules infringed may be explicit, or they may be from an unwritten code of conduct based on morality, ethics or custom, making the identification of cheating a subjective process. Cheating can refer...
on a test
Test (assessment)
A test or an examination is an assessment intended to measure a test-taker's knowledge, skill, aptitude, physical fitness, or classification in many other topics . A test may be administered orally, on paper, on a computer, or in a confined area that requires a test taker to physically perform a...
. However, at middle levels of education where rote memorization
Rote learning
Rote learning is a learning technique which focuses on memorization. The major practice involved in rote learning is learning by repetition by which students commit information to memory in a highly structured way. The idea is that one will be able to quickly recall the meaning of the material the...
is not as important as either basic education or intense graduate studies, high school or undergraduate students may be permitted to consult their own notes during the exam (which is not considered cheating). The act of preparing a so-called cheat sheet is also an educational exercise, thus students are typically only allowed to use cheat sheets they have written themselves. In such usage a cheat sheet is a physical piece of paper, often filled with equations and/or facts in compressed writing. Modern students often print cheat sheets in extremely small font, fitting an entire page of notes in the palm of their hands during the exam.
The term can also apply to the fully worked solution for exams or work sheets normally handed out to university staff to ease marking.
As reference cards
In more general usage, a "cheat sheet" is any short (one or two page) reference to terms, commands, or symbols where the user is expected to understand the use of such terms etc but not necessarily to have memorized all of them. Many computer applications, for example, have cheat sheets included in their documentation which list keystrokes or menu commands needed to achieve specific tasks to save the user the effort of digging through an entire manual to find the keystroke needed to, for example, move between two windows. An example of such a cheat sheet is one for the GimpGIMP
GIMP is a free software raster graphics editor. It is primarily employed as an image retouching and editing tool and is freely available in versions tailored for most popular operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux.In addition to detailed image retouching and...
photo editing software.
Some academic and technical publishers also publish cheat sheets for software packages and technical topics. In some cases these are also intended as display items in that they are colourful and visually appealing.
Web-based cheat sheets in the second sense described above, such as a reference to terms, commands, or symbols, have become extremely common.
In modern open-book internet-based examinations, the "cheat sheet" (loaded onto a USB stick for example) may be regarded as an essential component. Specifically, from the examiner's point of view, what the student loads is a strong indication of what the student knows. It is easier to click-direct from stick rather than typing.