I have always been a lover of academia and schools, but I have never been able to love exams — especially the closed book ones. My hatred may have been because on average, I am a poor performer in such exams, but even if I were a good performer, I would still hate taking them.
Last semester, I did well in the finals of one course, but if you would ask me if I could time travel back to December 2017 and take the test again, 10 times out of 10, I would say no.
I would rather choose several difficult assignments and ambiguous projects than taking one closed book exam. When you have exams tomorrow, anyways, you need to prepare for exams one two days back, and when you are studying for the exams, most of the things you study do not quite get transformed to the knowledge you will require to be successful in daily life. Preparing for exams also don’t give a broader sense of the world, it rather narrows your imagination, because you are only focusing for a test of 2-3 hours. So, just after taking the exam, I tend to forget all the information I had accumulated while preparing for it. Considering these facts, I often conclude, closed books exams are a big waste of time.
If subjective questions are set to test the breadth of the knowledge and how we would use our knowledge to solve the daily problems, exams are justifiable. I respect such exams which do not require us to memorize things, but I would still appreciate if the instructors focused rather on assigning project works and extra assignments instead of exams of any sorts. That would allow the students to have the practical experience of the things they learned in class, and they would also find the class fun and joyful.
Exams are not the single means of assessing how much a student has learned. The classes in which I learned and enjoyed the most are the ones which didn’t have closed book exams. In those courses, assignments, and projects were the major means of assessment, and the final grades we got were the fair indication of how much we learned in the class and how much time we spent in learning the materials taught. So, in that sense, closed book exams do not make that much of sense to me, and they feel like a big burden.