Rendering Success - An Evaluation of Cheat Sheets for a Third-year Computer Graphics and Image Processing Course

Student-created cheat sheets, also called crib sheets, exam notes, or reference sheets, have been used to reduce exam anxiety, de-emphasise memorisation, and enable students to focus on high level learning. Previous work has identified properties of cheat sheets which correlate with exam performance and has shown conflicting results about the benefits of cheat sheets for different subjects. However, no such study has been conducted for more advanced courses requiring knowledge from different fields and different representations, such as a text, (API) code, formulas, and images. In this research we investigate which characteristics of student cheat sheets predict exam performance for a third-year Computer Graphics and Image Processing course. We analyse exam results with reference to the cheat sheets and questions of different levels of Bloom's taxonomy, and we discuss implications for students and instructors. We found that higher exam scores are correlated with a better coverage of course material and more formulas. Having many example questions with sample solutions and missing lecture topics was correlated with lower grades. We found a correlation between several of our metrics and performance in questions related to Bloom's ''Apply'' category. We suggest that students should be taught how to identify key lecture concepts, how to represent them (source code vs. formulas), and how to use them in exams.