> 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.

A similar example is when proficiency in a language is necessary for study or work in another field. A university where all coursework is done in English, for example, needs for incoming students to be able to understand lectures and texts in real time. Tests like TOEFL or IELTS are reasonably good at measuring those skills when they are conducted in a proctored testing center. If test takers can use dictionaries, voice recognition software, machine translation, etc. during the test, then those real-time skills can no longer be measured accurately. Since last year, many universities have had to adopt other methods of evaluating applicants’ language skills, such as one-on-one interviews, which are more expensive and time-consuming.

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.

The class should effectively teach you how to make that distinction in a given field/topic. If you didn't pay attention at all, you won't know what to look for or how to figure something out quickly enough to pass. Cheating would be most damaging if the actual answers were shared or similar attacks on the integrity of the test itself.

Knowing how to find or determine the current correct answers yourself is often more useful in the long run than memorizing what amounts to trivia. This is especially true when it comes to open ended and quickly changing fields...

That's only a helpful responds if you believe exams are testing for your ability to synthesis novelty, which seems absurd to me.

I mean synthesize, too late to edit.