Reply #3: I've used open-book take-home exams for years (grad level courses)

[Snow]

with short & long answers. I want to test your knowledge of my coursework, not your ability to write fast or not freeze-up under pressure. Those are irrelevancies. And having no multiple choice questions means you have the opportunity to explain your thinking (which has saved some of my students' hides!). One time I had a couple of people with very similar answers. I warned them that I wanted to know if they both independently knew the stuff, otherwise I couldn't teach them properly, and that stopped.

TO my mind, tests serve three purposes:
- to allow the student to assess their progress, see what they might've missed that they thought they knew and to remedy that. A good test should be a teaching/learning tool.

- to help the teacher gauge where the class is as a whole, see whether there's any breakup with some people not getting some of the material, and thereby to pace the teaching.

- and, last and least, it gives a tool to assign the grade that the bureaucrats require.