My high school physics professor gave us a choice: You can bring hand-written notes to a tougher exam, or no notes to an easier exam. I forget what we chose, bu

My high school physics professor gave us a choice: You can bring hand-written notes to a tougher exam, or no notes to an easier exam. I forget what we chose, but it opened my eyes to the difference between memorizing formulae and understanding how to use ‘em. I now have (I think) a solid grasp of basic physics. Our chemistry professor had the opposite approach – memorize all the things and test that. I still don’t understand chemistry. In college every professor encouraged bringing notes, textbooks, anything you need. The exam is there to test your understanding, not whether you can memorize a bunch of trivia. The toughest exam I ever had was for the compilers class – 4 hours open internet do whatever you want as long as your compiler passes my unit tests. 2 questions: Add feature A and feature B to the compiler you built at tutorials this semester. Absolutely no way you could cheat on that.