My favorite history professor in college gave open book essay exams

I would hate open-ended questions like that if I didn't know the professor and I didn't know the grading, because it relies on the professor's ability to evaluate what is reasonable justification. I'm sure if the professor was great, this strategy is wonderful, but it also relies on a leap of faith in terms of the student. For example, if I was a black man and the teacher was white, my essays about slavery would be not about if I learned the material but my trying to work around determining how racist a teacher might be.

A similar phenomenon I’ve found, is if I know something can be done, I will work at it until it is done. For example, I’ve come up with solutions in interviews that I thought were the best, and then the interviewer says, “can it be done in O(n) time?” At that point, something clicks in my brain that says, “oh, of course it can!” If only I could find a way to tap into that in advance.

I had a teacher that did that in high school, but they were clearly looking for certain answers to open ended questions. An aspect of the class was determining just what kind of answers the grader would grade highly over other equally valid answers. At least with other kinds of tests, there's much less room for bias or interpretation, even if it still exists.

I really think all engineering exams should be open book, it's how we work. Bonus: suddenly much of 'cheating' is no longer a concern. You can ask harder questions! But when I know the technique I should be allowed to look up the formula. (Except I graduated years ago...)

> If I'm not scared and uncertain of how I am going to do something, of if something is even possible, than I probably am not tackling a hard enough problem. I like that sentence a lot. I'm working on something new at my job that's hard and uncertain, and it's the most fun and motivated I've been in my (fairly short) career as a software engineer. I might keep that idea around as a heuristic.

> asked your opinion on topics This is how International baccalaureate, french baccalaureate, and English A-levels courses generally go.

In my country, the system to access university includes a philosophy exam that works similarly. You are given a text to understand, summarise, discuss, and compare with a different author. They are testing for reading skills, reasoning and expression, so there is no good answer - knowing the works of different authors just makes it more likely that you'll know some ideas similar to the text at hand, but if you don't happen to know something similar you can, say, get a text by Marx and compare it to Plato, as long as you make a decent argument on the connection.