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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

> Ask an examiner from 20 years ago the risk of allowing people to take exams in their own home.

Isn't this like an "open-book" exam? We had them 50 years ago when I was doing my A-levels in the UK, and I always thought it was a good system. The trouble now is of course that you can ask the book to look up the answer, unless the question is very well thought out, which is hard. The open-book thing worked best IMHO for things like practical chemistry, where you needed the technique as well as the theory.

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Not really. An open book exam still requires you to know which book to bring in, understand the concepts, and be able to reference them on the fly to answer questions. Basically, you need a reasonable grounding in the material to know where to start figuring out your answer.

What’s different with at-home exams is there’s nothing stopping your ringing your friend to ask for the answer, or looking it up on Google (now ChatGPT), or asking your parents who happen to be in the industry, if you want to go really old school!

Also, in a well constructed open book exam having the book won’t help you worth a damn if you haven’t already read it at least once.

I've had plenty of open book exams where the prof knew you would fail if you grabbed the book for more than a second. It's pretty much the same as the exams where you get to write your own cheatsheet: if you need it too much you are screwed.

The act of writing the cheat sheet is often enough to remember I find. It's yet another repetition of the material, just like doing labs and practice exams. And if you wrote the cheat sheet yourself, you also often know "where to look" for something specific, even if it's just to be sure you didn't remember something incorrectly and you really do only need to look at it for a few seconds.

So in my book (pun intended :P), allowing and actually encouraging a "cheat sheet" is a good thing. Open book is worse, as it's usually way too large and badly indexed. And who's gonna use an actual book in their actual job anyway?

One quarter I made a cheat sheet so good the prof asked for a copy so he could use it as an overview sheet to teach the class next year.

I had used Illustrator to lay it all out. Lots of well type set diagrams and graphs alongside the equations.

Of course after spending the better part of 2 days making it I barely had to refer to it during the test!

I imagine spending 2 days making that turned out to be the most effective form of revision imaginable!

2 days is enough for copying most of the course by hand :)

Did that for a few I did not care about. Passed. Ofc I’m not as much of an expert in those compared to the ones I “broke my teeth” on.

I still have a few of the old illustrator files laying around.

The sheets were horrifically over made. They also benefited from my being fairly near sighted. You can fit a lot more in when using a 4 point font!

Cheat sheets have an extra bonus, they are a great way to trick students into studying without realizing it is studying. By giving them a limited size, the student has to consider all of what they know and decide which areas they are the weakest on that need to be included, which they then have to organize into a compact and quick to reference chart. It doesn't replace the more boring phases of studying, but it does create a one off that gets better engagement and is more personalized than a fillable study guide or example test.

I had a teacher who recommended what he called a Rumsfeld chart.

Read the course syllabus, now divide it into three lists:

- What you know you know

- What you know you don't know

- What's left is what you don't know you don't know

I’ll say I’m a little mixed on this, depending on how tight your timings are. A benefit of open book, I think, is that you can ask some more offbeat questions confident that the students are able to lookup the details. The challenge comes in knowing that they fully grasp the theory so they know how to find the information if it’s not in their short term memory.

Maybe a simplified example might be a question that forces you to consider different data structures and choose the right one? A student may not have the experience to know off the top of their head but they have a reference they can skim to check. The trick would be setting it out such that a student that didn’t know the principles would completely miss this and not know what to look for. Like they would do nested loops instead of populating a hashmap, perhaps.

I remember this open book exam on graphs… one of the questions was “take this algorithm that’s in all books, invert the condition you’re optimizing for and write the new algorithm in pseudo code”. No I don’t remember which particular algorithm it was, it’s been a bit.

80% of my mates didn’t solve it. It was right there in any graph algo book.

It does not help you if you don’t understand the material. If the exam is done right at least.

That’s a surprisingly good way of doing it!

The assumption when I had open book tests in undergrad was that if you needed the book, you had very little chance of passing the exam. It was useful as a quick reference, but there were too many questions to use for each one — you already had to have a good working knowledge of the material.

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