1. Problems in real life are all an open book test with unlimited time.
2. When I went to engineering school (MIT), back in the 60s, all of our tests and exams were open book, open notes, open anything you wanted. The questions were designed to make you think rather than recite memorized facts that would soon be forgotten. In general, if you had to look up how to solve a problem you were not going to get that one right.
“1. Problems in real life are all an open book test with unlimited time.”
Not true in all areas of life. In the Navy, your time may be limited to a fraction of a second.
In some courses I had, the final consisted of, “You have three hours. Use all the blue books you want. Tell me everything you learned this semester and what it means.”
OTOH, I have seen my kids in high school and college looking up answers in a textbook, entering them on line, and finishing well within the time allotted. A person who had never seen the material before could pass a test like that.
I’m not surprised to hear that MIT did things right, but how well would Southern Idaho Community College do?
When I went to Navy Counselor school in the Navy in 1986, they had the same idea. There were so many manuals with so many regulations that you couldn't possibly memorize all of it. The objective of the exams/tests were that you knew certain parameters and knew WHERE to look for the correct answer. Amazing how many failed and didn't graduate.
We were simple sailors, but the intricacy of military manuals with their (art.1) (chapter 3) (sub-chapter a-h) (sub sub letter designations 1 - 30) was just the first article in that ONE manual. It was sorta like Congressional staff associates spending hours on just one piece of legislation just to figure out what other law associates meant in the writing. Think Pelosi saying, "We have to pass it to see what's in it." Nobody knew.