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Comment by StanislavPetrov | Hacker News Reader

>I rely on written exams that are open book

How about cutting out the open book so that the students who don't study and to their homework actually fail? When I was in school many years ago "open book" was only used for special ed students and others who couldn't carry a regular academic workload. Homework was assigned, but our grades were determined solely by testing our mastery of the material. If you could master the material without doing the homework or showing up for class on non-testing days, more power to you. College has become more like kindergarten with all of the hand-holding.

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When I was in college, whether or not an exam was open book seemed orthogonal to the difficulty of the exam as well as the class's median uncurved score. Allowing the textbook or notes lets you write an exam that might otherwise be unreasonable.

In the classes I took with open note exams where I did well, I barely ended up consulting my notes anyway. The students who didn't study could flip through the textbooks all they wanted, but they lost so much time doing it that they couldn't complete all of the problems on the exam. For the students who studied well, the textbook was way easier to jump around in because they knew it well and knew what they were looking for.

Am exam that is designed to be closed book/closed note where a specific student is allowed some amount of notes as a disability accommodation is just different from one that is designed to be open note/open book from the start. The latter, testing the same material, is generally longer or harder to make better use of the format.

Open book exams IME are usually more difficult, since the exams can be crafted on the assumption that you don't need to dumb anything down since students can look up certain things.

We had a formula "cheat sheet" on every exam paper, but if you don't know when or why you're supposed to use a formula, it might as well not have been in the cheatsheet at all

Open book need not be easier, it entirely depends on the exam.

This was too long ago for me to remember the details of but, just making an example here, we might have had a course on homogeneization of elliptic problems using a model PDE with a div(A grad u) term throughout, and then the exam was about a PDE with a curl(A curl u) and some other added terms.

Notes carry the method and theoretical tools but you then still need to apply them to a new problem.

So, if anything, our open book exams were harder and a better test of understanding and mastery. You couldn’t rote your way into a good grade.

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