With the technologies of today, the ability to recite knowledge (versus using said knowledge when provided, and the ability to look for said knowledge) is rapidly losing value. But our education system has not moved on and are mostly stuck at using recital to judge student capability.
A complete rethinking of how to assess student performance is long overdue. For subjects that cannot be assessed without recital, maybe rethink the necessity of existence of those subject for teaching.
I didn’t think you are implying that having knowledge (ready to go) is of no value.
Having more knowledge gives a huge advantage in time and space. Not only can you solve problems much faster (you don’t need to find, read, understand, and internalize the “knowledge”) you can also make connections that others would miss because to gain knowledge is deeper than mere recall.
It focused on a planned development (hotels, grocery stores, etc) in a part of town that everybody in the class is quite familiar with and asked us to apply concepts from lecture to predict the impact to a given set of species.
It was masterful. Hit all the points, anchored in our everyday lives, applied in a way that rote memorization just wouldn't help with. I had a moment like: WTF I've lived here my whole life and never seen a wild ferret. Searched it after the tests and turns out they're native and critically endangered.
Just saying, the good ones are out there.
I tend to really appreciate 'open everything but people' exams, since they're a good way to actually check that people know how to complete a task. I think that a good one is probably harder for a professor to write, but the ones that I've taken have been a much better test of my understanding of the topic than ones where I was concerned with memorizing what the API for POSIX threads was.
Not so sure about infinite time, though. Seems like it makes it really easy for someone who has the time to dedicate a whole day (or the obsessiveness to do it even if they don't have the time) to do way better than someone who, for whatever reason, can't.
To me, the gold standard for computer science exams would be ~90m-3h with an open everything policy, including both a "do you know/can you apply the theory?" and a "can you do something practical with that?" section.
Cheating was prevalent in certain situations. I had a teacher that would leave the room during exams leaving the students to do whatever they wanted, which included the whole class hot debating the answer of each question. An engagement level that would never occur in a normal class.
In the CS lab (C++ for engineers) it was common for the student that finished the assignment first to mail the code to the whole class. Most would simply copy it, leave early and call it a day. Many also struggled with programming and put it in the category of "things that are hard and will not need to know".
Undergrad college had 'infinite time' and 'open everything but people' exams, but graded on a curve so that sometimes getting half the questions right was an A. Much more stressful, learned more, and basically no cheating.