this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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Properly made open book exams are not easier. The opposite.
One of the toughest classes I ever took had a final exam that was 24 hours long but it was done at home. It wasn't just open book, it was open internet. The only requirement was that we completed it individually.
It was the first and only exam I slept in the middle of.
It was something like 6 essay style questions in a CS topic, you had to pick 3 to answer.
It was my favourite exam. Not that I generally do badly on more traditional style exams (closed book, cheatsheet, open book, whatever), and not that it was easier because of the format. But it challenged us in real ways rather than test how much we memorized from the course material.
The assignments were similar, assignment 0 was to implement a console to run on an embedded system without an OS or standard libraries or anything other then a UART we could send one byte at a time over. We didn't even have print statements until we implemented them and got them to work (that was fun to debug). It was deliberately set up like that to encourage people to drop the course early so people on the waitlist could get their spot.
Open book where the question merely implies needing to know X without spelling it out is where it really gets hard
That, and also when the questions require actual understanding instead of memorized knowledge.
Also, our professors tended to make open book exams so tight on time that you couldn't realistically look most things up.