Anyone with an internet connection can easily find out, for example, how to add together two ints in Java. But if someone took an introductory Java course and couldn't do that at the end of it, then they don't deserve to pass because they've clearly not learned what they were supposed to. If they were actually trying to program something and had to look up basics like that every time they used them, they would be so slow as to be completely useless. Or consider someone with a more time-critical job like a surgeon - they can do specific research beforehand but some level of knowledge (surgical techniques, how to use their tools, anatomy, etc.) is simply going to have to be in their head at the moment they need it or their patient could die.
Also, phones and internet access don't just provide knowledge, they're a way to communicate with everyone else in the room. If you want to see if any particular person has actually learned the material, you obviously can't allow that.
Isn't that the point of timed tests? You can structure a test such that the person who needs to look up how to add two ints in Java will waste so much time that they wouldn't be able to finish the test. And if they can search for and apply this knowledge quickly enough, then maybe they've proven that they won't be slow if they have to do it in the real world.
My favourite exams were open book but still hard/long enough that if you didn't already know 95% of the material, you simply wouldn't have time to complete it.
As an aside, I hated open book exams - if you were talented and knew the material, you could typically blast through a closed-book examination in half the allotted time and get out of there, while the open-book exams were far longer and more tedious.
I would argue that this is also a valuable skill. Knowing who to hire, assessing the person's abilities, figuring out if they can actually get the job done in the time allotted. Sure it's not at the same level that a hiring manager at a tech company in the real world would have to make, but then again the normal CS test questions aren't at that level either.
Ideally tests should check the deeper understanding of the student and not just his memory skills. In that case Internet access is also not a problem.
I think there IS utility in assessing people with the constraint of "you can't talk to anybody else", but I'm not comfortable with that being the dominant, primary means of assessment. It should be consistent with the likelihood that you'll actually be forced to work stuff out on your own- maybe 10, 20% at most?
Your thoughts?
However, many times the calculation is just a very small piece of a much larger puzzle. In such situations, being able to perform small computations rapidly in your head makes a qualitative difference that can really give you a competitive advantage.
In school we had one larger test in German where the teacher left us alone for 4 hours. What I noticed was that we did collaborate to some extent – we shared and discussed ideas. But since we had to write an essay with our interpretation of some piece of literature there wasn't much possibility of "cheating" per se. Simply copying the text from another would not work and copying their ideas outright wouldn't either. And to get at least something of decent length there wasn't the option of fooling around for three hours either. Granted, this was in 11th grade, so we were a bit older already. It may well fail spectacularly in other environments. The teacher knew us for a few years and trusted us, and it worked out.
Internet access is a lot more complex though, you'd have to filter what they can access and monitor everything every student is accessing, and that doesn't seem worth it for most tests. Image a scenario where the students just throws any question on a random looking site and some hired expert on the other side writes appropriate answers on the fly. Your test won't have any meaning anymore.
Now test are flawed by definition, you'll always have to create some artifical restriction to control what aspect you are assessing. Idealy you never test someone by putting him/her in a room with a pncil and paper, you'd assess how good the students cleared real tasks in realistic conditions.
Anyway, I was pure math major and we could bring pretty much anything short of an actual desktop computer into exams -- it was pretty much useless. (Now, a few years later, and Mathematica running on a maxed out Mac would have been pretty darn useful.)
Having a computer in class opens the door for cheating, but in smaller classes it would be easy to tell if a student were browsing the Internet rather than finding a determinant.