The type of open book tests described at the start of this thread seem to be a bit much to me. They seem particularly silly if a student is just copying an answer to a straightforward question ("Hydrogen has one proton. page 52.")
When I was in college, open-book tests were usually take-home exams that consisted of one or more very difficult questions. In the humanities, the questions always were always directly related to whatever we were studying. Answering the question(s) required us to consult multiple sources of information, hence the term "open book." They were actually more akin to short research projects than to exams.
In math or science, open book tests were ways to measure how well you could apply concepts. You had to really know your stuff to answer the questions, and the open-book part was the instructor's way of saying "In the real world, people look up formulae to avoid making mistakes. But you have to know what a formula means before you can apply it."
Pardon me for getting onto my soapbox here, but to me, this is just more evidence of our education system continuing its downhill slide in its apparent quest for new and dumber ways to dilute an already-watered down curriculum. If things continue this way, they'll find themselves diluting water. I wonder how that will work out. Perhaps we'll turn oceans into fresh water and kill all the marine life in the process. // </metaphor>
It all reminds me of something I used to read in Princeton Review test prep books. One their main points was basically: "The SAT doesn't test how smart you are or how much you've learned about English and Math. It just tests how much you know about how to take the SAT."
Our NCLB-driven multiple-choice-test-obsessed education system is now forcing schools to teach students how to take <insert test name e.g. California STAR test>. Creating educated, informed citizens is a secondary pursuit at best.
Okay, I'll stop ranting. I have to get it out sometimes.
Val
