Make or Take: How Students Navigate Self-Created and Instructor-Provided Cheat Sheets

Synthesis: Chen, Sakhnini and Istead run a three-wave longitudinal study in a senior software-requirements course where students could use instructor-provided or self-created cheat sheets in exams. Choices were shaped by trust in instructor expertise, desire for personalization, and preparation efficiency, and shifted over time. The make-vs-take decision is fundamentally a Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning question — creating a cheat sheet is itself a generative study strategy — with direct implications for exam design in Authentic Assessment, for optimizing preparation such as Do Gains from Generative AI-Enabled Adaptive Pretesting Persist? Evidence from a Retention Study, and for cognitive-structure views of exams like LearnOpt: Recovering the Latent Cognitive Structure of Standardized Examinations via Knowledge Graphs and Constrained Optimization. It also frames the trade-off AI raises: offloading artifact creation versus learning through creation, cf. Cognitive offloading and the speedup illusion in human-AI interaction.

Key Findings

• Across three exams in the course, students' make-vs-take preferences were dynamic, not fixed: the balance between self-created and instructor-provided sheets shifted over time as students learned what actually helped them.
• The decision was driven by three recurring factors — trust in the instructor's curation, the desire for a personalized sheet, and the efficiency of preparation — meaning the "take" choice is often an effort/trust trade-off rather than pure preference.
• Constructing a cheat sheet operated as an active, generative study strategy (selection, condensation, organization), linking the choice directly to metacognitive and self-regulated learning rather than mere logistics.
• The findings reframe exam policy: whether a student makes or takes a sheet shapes not just performance but the learning process itself, a tension that mirrors AI-driven cognitive offloading.

What this means for practice

• Instructors. Choose the cheat-sheet policy by the study behavior you want rather than by administrative convenience: students who built their own sheets reported significantly longer preparation time for the midterm and described selecting, organizing, and compressing material as studying itself.
• Assessment designers. Design exams so that an instructor-provided sheet still demands the judgment the course certifies; across both formats students described sheets mainly as cutting recall time for formulas and definitions rather than replacing reasoning.
• Instructors. State what a sheet may contain and how it may be used, because students reported over-reliance, difficulty locating information quickly, and frustration with legibility and space constraints even while valuing the sheets.
• Instructors. Expect the choice to move: preferences were dynamic across the three exams, so treat make-vs-take as a per-student Self-Regulated Learning decision rather than a fixed rule for a course.
• Instructors. Weigh offloading against metacognitive rehearsal as AI enters preparation: if an Large Language Models (LLMs) drafts the artifact, the construction work that made self-created sheets valuable may be lost, which argues for Authentic Assessment and Formative Assessment designs that reward the process of construction.

Limitations

• Single course and single term: one senior-level undergraduate software-requirements course taught by one instructor under one cheat-sheet policy, so the choices observed may not transfer to introductory programming, other exam structures, or online and hybrid delivery.
• Small survey waves: 53, 50, and 44 responses across the three waves, with only 41 students completing all three and forming the longitudinal cohort used for the over-time analysis.
• No artifact-level comparison: the study recorded how students reasoned about the options, not what the two sheet types actually contained, so overlap in content, organization, information density, and exam alignment is unknown.
• AI-supported cheat-sheet creation was not examined, and no student in the data identified AI as a reason for choosing instructor-provided over self-created sheets.

Citation

Helen Weixu Chen, Victoria Sakhnini, Lesley Istead (2026). Make or Take: How Students Navigate Self-Created and Instructor-Provided Cheat Sheets.