Given that a typical programmer on a typical day has online access, and given the creative lengths students will go to to maintain access to said resources during exams, it seems worth considering allowing online access for programming exams. To address the obvious problems with that approach, could we use AI to generate unique variations on the problems we want the students to solve?
Teaching, even at the collegiate level, has become "how can I do the least so I can do what I want". Tenured research professors generally make terrible teachers...perhaps we need professional teachers.
The hardest exam I ever took was my final exam for Linear Algebra. It was so "open" that people could use matlab on a shared computer that was also projected to the entire class. Turns out, the best students in the class didn't need help on a computer, so it turned into this kind of mind-fuck where you weren't sure if they got a different answer than you because they were wrong, or because you were. To add to the excitement, the questions all tied together and used the answer from the previous one, so if you missed one, you were guaranteed to miss every subsequent question.