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When I was in college, many exams allowed the student to bring in a single sheet of paper with notes. You knew such tests would be hard, because they wouldn't b

When I was in college, many exams allowed the student to bring in a single sheet of paper with notes. You knew such tests would be hard, because they wouldn't be testing your knowledge (since you had that written down); they'd be testing your understanding. There were apocryphal stories of years past, when the rule had sometimes been "you can bring anything you can carry" (this was decades before WiFi). Supposedly, one test taker carried in a grad student on his back.

ajdecon 16y ago
In my upper-level physics courses, where the exams were mostly derivations and intense problem-solving, we had a rough guide to exam difficulty: * One sheet of notes allowed: expect to take close to the full 2 hours alloted. * Open notes and book: expect not to finish at all, and recalibrate to 75%==A+. * Take-home exam: feel free to spend 40 hours on this. No one in this class is going to get over a 50% anyway.
- Avshalom 16y ago
  I remember one particular take home test, 25 questions and the prof handed it to us and said "if any question takes you more than 5 hours you should probably move on and come back to it later." She full expected us to spend 80-100 hours on the thing (the week before finals too, oh we hated her). I don't actually know any college student who doesn't cringe at the thought of take home tests. EDIT: just to be clear this is meant as commiseration not as a misery dick waving contest. It was the largest time requirement of any undergrad class I took in the 5 years I was there.
arethuza 16y ago
On the CS course I did we had a few "open book" exams where you could pretty much take along anything you wanted - these were by far the most difficult exams as you were generally given rather open ended design questions where having a set of notes with you didn't really help that much - unless you were familiar with the relevant concepts and strategies involved you were going to fail.
jackowayed 16y ago
These hard open book test stories are great, but taken in the context of it being high school and the other suggestions ("Weigh the merit of using any essay questions at all", "Offer a maximum of 3 choices", etc), it's pretty clear that the suggestion of open book tests with page number references is not meant to ensure that teachers give tests that you can only pass if you actually understand the material--it's made so that people will do better on the tests because they'll be easier.
endtime 16y ago
Most of Stanford's CS exams are open-book and/or open-note. (There's even had one where we were allowed to browse and search a PDF of the course text on our laptops, on our honor not to use our laptops for anything else.) Helpful, but as others have said, most of what it means is that the exam questions are much harder.

ajdecon 16y ago

In my upper-level physics courses, where the exams were mostly derivations and intense problem-solving, we had a rough guide to exam difficulty: * One sheet of notes allowed: expect to take close to the full 2 hours alloted. * Open notes and book: expect not to finish at all, and recalibrate to 75%==A+. * Take-home exam: feel free to spend 40 hours on this. No one in this class is going to get over a 50% anyway.

Avshalom 16y ago
I remember one particular take home test, 25 questions and the prof handed it to us and said "if any question takes you more than 5 hours you should probably move on and come back to it later." She full expected us to spend 80-100 hours on the thing (the week before finals too, oh we hated her). I don't actually know any college student who doesn't cringe at the thought of take home tests. EDIT: just to be clear this is meant as commiseration not as a misery dick waving contest. It was the largest time requirement of any undergrad class I took in the 5 years I was there.

arethuza 16y ago

On the CS course I did we had a few "open book" exams where you could pretty much take along anything you wanted - these were by far the most difficult exams as you were generally given rather open ended design questions where having a set of notes with you didn't really help that much - unless you were familiar with the relevant concepts and strategies involved you were going to fail.

jackowayed 16y ago

These hard open book test stories are great, but taken in the context of it being high school and the other suggestions ("Weigh the merit of using any essay questions at all", "Offer a maximum of 3 choices", etc), it's pretty clear that the suggestion of open book tests with page number references is not meant to ensure that teachers give tests that you can only pass if you actually understand the material--it's made so that people will do better on the tests because they'll be easier.

endtime 16y ago

Most of Stanford's CS exams are open-book and/or open-note. (There's even had one where we were allowed to browse and search a PDF of the course text on our laptops, on our honor not to use our laptops for anything else.) Helpful, but as others have said, most of what it means is that the exam questions are much harder.