Everybody hates closed book exams. If you’re reading this, and you have a closed book exam coming up, chances are it’s stressing you out. Grades from closed book exams often fail to reflect your effort or understanding of the material. Their arbitrary nature makes them fundamentally unfair. By lowering your grades relative to your understanding of the material, they can cause grade deflation, which can hold you back from the internships, graduate schools, and even jobs you deserve.
The only reason we still have closed book exams is because many professors have propped them up as the status quo. Many argue closed book exams are a necessary and objective way to assess learning outcomes and that they allow professors to punish students who don’t put in the work. None of those assumptions are true. Very few exams can legitimately claim objectivity, since most have at least some individually assessed component which includes subjective assignments of partial credit. Closed book exams don’t just punish slackers, instead serving as cruel “gotcha” moments even for many of the most hardworking students. And COVID-19 has shown us open book exams are just as, if not more, effective for the assessment of learning outcomes. In the fall at WashU, professors selected more challenging material for open exams, and student grades were, on average, higher than they were prior to the pandemic.
The entire justification for closed book exams is built on a lie, and with the truth revealed, professors have incentives to ban them. Open book exams reward students for taking good notes, allow students to learn during the exam, and let students develop real-life skills like collaboration and internet research. Instead of recalling endless streams of impractical information (did you know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell?), open book exams give students opportunities to use that information. Open book exams are better at preparing students for the workplace and set us up for real-life success.
A skeptical reader might stop me here. Great, so open book exams are clearly better in just about every way, for both professors and students. But no one has ever implemented a policy like this, so what makes me think I have a viable implementation plan?
Great question. Instead of trying to force the move through the arcane system of university governance one bureaucrat at a time, I’m going to lobby individual departments to take up the reforms. Instead of one department’s objections holding the whole plan back, we’ll start with the departments most open to the reform, then persuade holdouts to get on the bandwagon, and bring it through the faculty governance system only once we have support among a majority of departments. I will use research and empirical data to inform my strategy and work together with my peers in Student Union.
I know it can be done. Before I transferred here and served as an ArtSci Vice President, I served as Oberlin College’s Senate Policy Director. In that role I managed Oberlin’s academic response to COVID-19. I singlehandedly negotiated key parts of Oberlin’s COVID-19 grading policies. Specifically, I changed a Pass/Fail system to a Pass/No Record system, lowered the pass threshold by five points, and allowed students to choose grades or Pass/No Record a week after grades were released, instead of during midterms. The point of all this is that COVID-19 has made changes that seemed impossible easy to imagine.
The implications of this policy would be huge. Banning closed book exams would motivate students to take better notes, substantially reduce stress, and significantly reduce required studying time while improving learning outcomes and allowing professors to test for a more nuanced understanding of the material. This is good for everyone. Students will be happier and better prepared for the future, which is also what every good professor wants. This would be such a significant quality-of-life improvement that it could even be marketed in admissions. All we need to do is make it happen.
