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Comment by harikb

3 hours ago

Laptop without internet access, sure. Pencil and paper? that is brutal :)

20 years ago this was not unheard of. One exam we had to translate C code to assembly for one of the exercises, convert to numbers to IEEE754 representations and similar, both tasks where access to a laptop would make it possible to cheat. Also had to modify some small computer architecture diagrams if I recall correctly.

For the linear algebra written exam it didn’t work as if you learned to solve the 4 previous years exams, you could be sure most of it was familiar, so you could just prepare for a few standard exercises without really understanding the content.

Our advanced algorithm course used a bit of a combination, with a project take home exam (knapsack like optimization problem - competing for the fastest implementation) combined with a two hour written exam with multiple choice answers, but again only with books, pencil and paper to get to the right answer. This I think could work today, having both the opened ended project + some multiple choice with pencil/paper.

I did most of my CS class tests this way within the last year. It’s not that bad because prof doesn’t care about syntax so much (unless that’s what we’re testing on of course) and details, but wanting instead to make sure we understand broader concepts.