I’ll say I’m a little mixed on this, depending on how tight your timings are. A benefit of open book, I think, is that you can ask some more offbeat questions confident that the students are able to lookup the details. The challenge comes in knowing that they fully grasp the theory so they know how to find the information if it’s not in their short term memory.
Maybe a simplified example might be a question that forces you to consider different data structures and choose the right one? A student may not have the experience to know off the top of their head but they have a reference they can skim to check. The trick would be setting it out such that a student that didn’t know the principles would completely miss this and not know what to look for. Like they would do nested loops instead of populating a hashmap, perhaps.
I remember this open book exam on graphs… one of the questions was “take this algorithm that’s in all books, invert the condition you’re optimizing for and write the new algorithm in pseudo code”. No I don’t remember which particular algorithm it was, it’s been a bit.
80% of my mates didn’t solve it. It was right there in any graph algo book.
It does not help you if you don’t understand the material. If the exam is done right at least.
Maybe a simplified example might be a question that forces you to consider different data structures and choose the right one? A student may not have the experience to know off the top of their head but they have a reference they can skim to check. The trick would be setting it out such that a student that didn’t know the principles would completely miss this and not know what to look for. Like they would do nested loops instead of populating a hashmap, perhaps.