External Aids Do you allow students to use any external reference aids on exams? (For example, open book, open notes, student supplied note pages or formulas, instructor supplied note pages.)

For instructor supplied aids, please describe. For any student supplied aids, what restrictions do you enforce? (For example, number of pages, content such as not allowing worked out examples, authorship such as personally generated vs. photocopied.)

I typically let students use a page of notes, whatever they want to put on there, for an exam. For the final, I let them use 2 pages of notes. I provide tables for them in a packet during each exam, and they turn them in again at the end of the exam, along with their "cheat sheets." I think the cheat sheets are very informative; they show us as teachers what the students thought were the most important items that they needed to know. It also shows us how students organized the information, and what their interpretation was. I always use closed book exams; I think rifling through a book can be distracting and really keeps students from studying as much beforehand as they should. Having a cheat sheet forces them to organize their thinking before hand, and eliminates situations wehre they forgot a certain formula and were unable to work an entire page of problems as a result. Again, this allows the student to be more accountable for their exam performance, in my view.