I finished up the coursework for my masters degree at the start of the pandemic. My university was quite flexible for how instructors would examine us, given how sudden everything had to change.

One of my courses, which only had about 8 students and two instructors, decided to do an oral examination, which ended up being basically a very in-depth, one on one conversation about the course material and based on the expectations set in the syllabus (so, no surprises).

While obviously not practical for large rosters, this was by far the best exam format that I have ever done in my many, many years of schooling. I'm sure not everyone would prefer it, but the students unanimously agreed to try it (wouldn't have done it that way otherwise), and it was just so great. It was not at all like an oral thesis defense, which was what I was a little worried about.

In my alma mater for most courses we had to actually discuss what we wrote(and maybe some other topics) with the lector as part of the exam. Some were open book, some were closed. Regardless of that however when you get to talk to the professor it's very hard to fake knowledge and especially logical thinking. It sure takes more time(we usually had one on one for about 20-30 minutes per student), but you can size a person way better than just reviewing what he wrote/selected. And there is no obstacle(other than time constraints, which can be worked around) to continue doing this even during the pandemic. I think we are overestimating technology such as AI and its applications. Some things are just plain better when done by a person. I had a very positive experience with one professor who chose to round up my grade instead of down, because my errors were technical(carelessness mostly) not logical, so he then asked me questions from subsequent chapters to see my reasoning. I really didn't care that much about the grade, but that discussion and the overall experience of failures that could lead to positive change through introspective analysis is something that you can't get from an AI or any pipeline processing.

Thank you! I'm sure it takes more work to make an open book exam, but it's definitely to the benefit of your students.

If you can't see them, doesn't that open up the possibility of students taking the exam together?

When I was involved in the teaching of a course that allowed this, one student basically reduced all the course notes onto a single two-sided page, except they also had flaps on it to fit more in. The exam invigilator took it from them deeming it (correctly imo) to not be in the spirit of the allowance. We decided we'd mark their exam, and then determine what we should do about this cheating-cheat-sheet. Given they got something like 5% in the exam anyway, we decided to let it slide.

My own experience of making up those cheat sheets is the same as yours, the effort put in to create them is an excellent teaching tool in itself, as you're studying and distilling all the stuff you don't know well, and by the time you're done, you hardly have to refer to it in the exam anyway.

For physics, they'd just give us a page with all the formulas but with no context aside from the letters in them, so if you knew roughly what it should look like, you could find it and you're not at so much risk of making a basic error under pressure.

I still have a couple of the cheat sheets my study group compiled -- they're so fun to look back on. One for Computer Organization is almost unintelligible to me now; we were so proud of the density of that sucker.

This was common in my engineering school too. I enjoyed creating the cheat-sheets more than any other form of studying, because what better way of learning three chapters of thermodynamics than having to distill them into 10 lines of text on a notecard.

I always permitted/encouraged this when I taught (I'm retired now). Every once in a while, we'd find some enterprising student selling pre-made cheat sheets, which were of course of little value to the purchaser.

At one point in college, I printed "Don't Panic" in large letters on one of these one page cheat sheets.

This raised eyebrows of the TA's proctoring the exam, but like, if you don't know the stuff, a page isn't going to help you at that point.

I recall at some point that I started writing that type of cheat sheet, even if I didn't get to refer to it in the exam, for that reason.

Just as a counter example. I have 2 "advanced" degrees - in engineering and in management (btw I did NOT do them because I was smart - but rather because I was curious and had a lot of time on my hand. I definitely struggled in both of them - though really really enjoyed them both). I am not what you call a model test-taker. I got barely passing marks in all my exams and yet my "assignments" I was consistently a high scorer in (sadly assignments at the time only accounted for atmost 20% of your grade with 80% being what you can cram-and-dump in an exam).

I still cannot "remember" how to perform a discrete-wavelet-transform from memory (my honor's thesis) but i found myself digging into it a couple of months ago (just fiddling on pet projects). An hour on googling got me on the track. Point is there is so much even those with advanced degrees have to know and having to retain it all in memory all the time is both infeasible and wasteful. Yet expecting kids/young adults to do this is truly hypocritical and disingenuous.

I'm a physics grad student, and this is completely wrong. The purpose of graduate classes (at least in physics) is to teach you how to navigate a the standard reference texts. For example, the main thing I learned in my grad E&M class was where to find information in Jackson (aka "Classical Electrodynamics"). Classical mechanics was a mix of Goldsmith and Landau and Lifshitz. Quantum mechanics used Sakauri. And statistical mechanics used Pathria. Also, referring to these classic texts by author is very common, much moreso than by title.

My experience with people who are PhD is that they know things you expect to memorize just because they use it a lot. They learn formulas or whatever not because they spend 5 hours memorizing it, but because they needed it once, so they looked it up. The second time they needed it, they weren't 100% sure, so they looked it up again just in case. Every time they search for it, they need it less and less and at the end they know it by memory. That's how you learn most of the stuff these days and that should be for everything. Natural learning. Why memorizing things you dont need to know?If you use it often enough, you'll end up memorizing it. Same for concepts or any type of knowledge.

1. PhDs don’t “do exams”. You can’t cheat your way to publishing original research (exceptions of course) and have external expert researchers review it and accepted on a reputable journal. Given that that’s a requisite for obtaining your degree, there’s no point on a final exam. Most defenses nowadays are partly ceremonial (exceptions of course). Both the material and your ability to do research has been checked months before by your advisors and graduation committee.

2. Master’s degree courses follow all kinds of schemas for examination. From oral exams, to in person no extra material allowed, to open book, and take home. Being on both sides (taking the exams and creating them) I can say that it really doesn’t matter if you allow people to take the exam home and collaborate among each other. These types of exams are designed to really test a deep understanding and ability of the material. There have been exam questions where an entire class of >20 students are not able to solve it. People that are really good are able to have a shot at it and maybe make some progress, and that differentiates the good from the exceptional.

3. Nowadays undergraduate degrees are a commodity so it feels they need to make sure only the good students get one. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, since most employers (exceptions of course) will want to see how much value the candidate add, which does not correlate with having a degree or good grades

When I have discussed this, most people I know argued the opposite (for Mathematics). The undergrad courses are supposed to lay the foundation. Stuff you need so often, and stuff you need to recognize when useful, you should know it by heart.

At graduate level, there is too much stuff. You know the outline, you know where to find stuff. But you don't need to know everything exactly. If you forgot one passage from a definition, that should not cause a failure. Because in 'real Mathematics' you get to look at references.

A nice trick for open book is to make it time-infeasible to just look up everything. But allow students access to the materials incase they have a brainfart.

It depends on the degree. If you're becoming a medical doctor you'll have to do a ton of memorization, but in other fields doctorates are the least memorization-intensive part of your education, because the focus is on generation and synthesis, on the assumption that you've already learned the rote knowledge. You don't need to memorize anything to write a dissertation but that doesn't make it easy (and you'll end up memorizing everything anyway).

This is why PhD's typically have comprehensive exams. It varies (a lot!) by university and even department, but panel led oral exams are pretty common. At some places they are even open to the public (no pressure). These are distinct from a thesis defence, which happens at the end of your degree; they are likely to happen about a year in and are meant to ensure you have a solid background.

Overall I think an oral exam run by a skilled examiner is the best of all worlds, but it isn't practical for a section of 500 undergraduate students. It's quite doable for a seminar or manageable up to say 10-15 students, becomes difficult after that.

Often the tests at this level are difficult enough that the need for memorization is implicit.

Open book is also fine in this case because without a base of memorized understanding an open book isn't that helpful anyway.

> Except for some contrived or rare circumstances someone will now point out.

I don't know about you, but I tend to want my pilots, surgeons, and lawyers to tend towards self-competent, and I don't think those circumstances are contrived or rare. It's not to say that they can't ask for help before or during flight/operation/trial -- and in fact asking for help and crew-resource management is important for those fields -- but not all fields are like software engineering or aerospace where there may be dozens or hundreds of people that can help you in a timely fashion if you have completely no idea what you're doing. I'd prefer pilots, surgeons, and lawyers that didn't cheat their way into their jobs.

That only works if the answer can be looked up.

Real life isn't always kind enough to only give problems that someone has already solved and published somewhere you can find.

Honestly, any tests I took that were open book were long enough that if you were constantly looking things up you'd never finish. Same would occur if you were talking to someone and they were having to relay the info.

Part of the benefit of open book tests is that it brings up the "floor" of resource access, limiting the potential differential between honest and cheating students. Obviously, this could be negatively compensated for with other factors, like having more questions or stingy grading.