Today I read an article about technical means of fighting hi-tech and low-tech cheats at exams in universities. One of the conclusions of the author was to allow wider use of open book/open notes exams. This article evoked some of my personal thoughts on the subject.
At the time and place where I was doing my undegraduate degree the very notion of the open book exam did not exist. It was unthinkable of. The way the exams were set up, the open book would mean that you could get pretty much all the answers from the book.
As a matter of fact the first time I encountered this open book exam phenomena was here at GWU School of Business. When I heard about it first time I was quite surprised. I could not understand what to make of it. I even thought that may be this was some kind of a device to help lazy students not to fail their exam. In a sense I felt that my course was somewhat of a lesser value because of this open book allowance.
When the actual exam arrived I realized that even though you can look up some formulas or concepts it is not really of great help. The way the questions and problems were formulated you still had to figure out how to apply that raw textbook knowledge. In a sense, professor makes the exam harder if it is an open book exam, by testing your analytical skills, rather than pure memory.
So, now I don’t have reservations about course quality, nor do I get a sigh of relief when professor announces open book exam. I know it’s probably going to be harder than if it were a closed book exam.
So far out of 7 classes I have had and am having right now only one class had exclusively closed book/notes quizzes and exam – Microeconomics. Business Ethics did not have exams/quizzes altogether – we were graded on Research Paper and class participation. Decision Making/Judgement & Uncertainty had a combination of both types of exam, including take home exam. Both Financial Accounting I and II had open book exams, closed book quizzes.
Our professor in Global Perspectives has only open book quizzes and exams policy. It’s his philosophy. In first class he told us, that when he had been working on consulting projects, client could call them and ask to dig as much information as possible on a particular topic and present a paper in the next 3 hours. As professor mentioned, client would never tell them: “Just don’t use any of the books or notes.” That made perfect sense to me and reconciled any last doubts I might have about the class with open book/open notes exams.
Admittedly, instructor would have to work harder to prepare the exam, so you could not just get the answers by looking them up. The exam should be not on memorization or testing your book skimming skills, but analytical in nature, where there is either no right or wrong answer, or where there is a right answer, but you need to figure out how to get to it.
Of all the open quizzes and exams I had so far, I can think of only one that was kind of easy in the way that you could just find many of the answers (not all, still) in the textbook. The rest of the open book exams were quite challenging and the book was there more as a psychological pacifier 
