[ylem]

It reminds me of a graduate quantum class I had. The professor gave what he called "infinite time length exams". We would come in during the afternoon and we could stay as long as we wanted to work on the exam--though we had to slip it under his door by say 9:00am. You could bring as many books as you wanted (apparently at one point you could bring "anything" and someone brought a professor--but that could just be a story). But, if you didn't finish in a reasonable time, you probably weren't going to get the answer.

[zshift]

My modern physics professor did this for all our assignments. He didn’t want to rush students to fill out answers, so he made the questions very hard. We had to really understand the mechanics in order to answer the questions. I retained so much more by learning this way when compared to wrote memorization, and it was fun having discussions with other students to help each other understand the concepts.

[chii]

i really like this sort of exams, where some artificial condition isn't imposed on the examinees for ranking purposes.

I had a computer science exam where you are allowed to bring any text book/reference book you wish, and any notes you've written yourself. The exam was long and hard yes, but it was also thorough. One of the more enjoyable exams i recall taking - vs all of the other types.

[jawzz]

With online learning, basically all of my exams are like this. I’ve heard of some people having proctored online exams, but luckily my school’s Math and CS departments seem to have opted to just make the questions harder/unable to be looked up, and gave up on restricting us from using notes or the internet. It’s actually surprising how well it works, if the professor can design the exam cleverly enough. Really the only way you can cheat is by colluding with other students (which admittedly is a fairly big issue) or, for some types of programming questions, by just running the code on your own machine (which again can be avoided by clever test design).

[harry8]

Isn't this just an assignment where you're not sufficiently trusted to be in the location that suits you best (eg library, your desk?) A fully proctored assignment, you may not ask questions once you've read the problem.

I guess it has merit if cheating of that nature is a big problem.