Student-Generated Exam Crib Sheets: What Do They Write? An Examination of Crib Sheet Features

Many first-year General Chemistry course instructors provide students with exam aids, often including items such as the periodic table of elements, physical constants, tables of physical data, or formulas. Recently, we experimented with allowing first-year General Chemistry students to prepare and use their own single-page exam crib sheets, with almost no restrictions on what they could prepare and write. We studied the student-generated crib sheets to learn more about what students chose to write on their sheets and if there were observable differences in the features on crib sheets for high-performing and low-performing students. Student sheets typically contained short memory aids, were often text-heavy, and frequently included problem-solving aids (more often specific examples rather than generic problem-solving algorithms). These exam aids were generally well-organized and appeared to be useful and readable. Analyzing the crib sheets for the top and bottom quartiles on the final exam showed that the top quartile had three organizational features (Boxes, Headings, and Color) and two content-related features (Specific Examples and Definitions) appear significantly more often.