Comment by pdonis
15 hours ago
> every exam was take home
When I was at MIT, most exams were in-class, but open book, open notes, open whatever you wanted to bring with you. And of course that just meant the exams were much harder, because they could assume you had all the necessary reference materials at hand and didn't have to conjure things up from memory. "Cheating" was pointless, because everyone else in the room was struggling just as hard as you were.
The advantage(?) of take-home exams à la Caltech is that they can be open everything and 3–5 hours long :-P (For what it's worth, being able to listen to music during an exam, ctrl+F a digital textbook, etc. was super awesome; it would deeply sadden me if that becomes infeasible in the future once enough students stop caring about the Honor Code....)
I had in-class exams at MIT that were up to 3 hours long. Take home would definitely have been nicer.
Could students use the bathroom during the exam? If not, sheesh it could hard to hold it when very nervous during a long exam!
I only recall some finals at MIT being that long. Which classes had normal exams that long?
2 replies →
Same, but before AI.
The thought being that the Engineering exams were so difficult that even with the text book, you had little chance of getting it right unless you knew the material.
Often, final exams were just one question, but you were graded on the multiple pages of work you had to show.
This is genius. I wish my own university exams were similar. I wasted so much mental effort trying to memorise stuff for an exam. In the real world, what you really need is a "good mental index" to know where to look it up. Sure, you can go to an extreme (in the wrong direction -- a "know-nothing"), but I felt memorising endless organic chemistry reactions for an exam was pointless for the real world.
"Cheating" was pointless, because everyone else in the room was struggling just as hard as you were.
That reminds me of what an instructor (one of the best ones I've had) said a long time ago in response to one of my classmates asking if the exam could be open-book: "I could make it so, but it's not going to get any easier." The same instructor also responded to another question with "it doesn't mean I won't change the length of the exam."