Written Exams Should Be Open Book For Science Subjects.

While I can understand how one may have ended up at Pro's interpretation of my arguments, it is fundamentally not what I was saying.I am fully aware that people can study for open book but the bell curve and point about only capable people passing exams are what my key arguments were (which Pro misconstrued to be irrelevant to the resolution). The fundamental issue with open book exams is that incompetent people who can only learn fast but retain nothing will be scoring far high o the bell curve than closed book would allow them too. This has a two-fold effect. If open book enables a super-fast reader to gain 90% but a hard working guy to get 89% whereas in closed book the super-fast reader would get 10% and the hard working guy 89% (and the bell curve drops the hard-worker a grade thanks to the multitude of skim readers destroying him/her), there is a clear problem. What does technology have to do with this? Technology is irrelevant. An exam should mean that all those passing it whether they want to become the world's top neurosurgeon or a nurse, should be able to do that job by either taking their learning further based on how well they proved their ability to retain information. In science the ability to retain information is vital. There is simply no way that a doctor who doesn't have a knowledge of almost every disease and how symptoms combine will ever diagnose you correctly if you have anything but the first thing that appears Google. In addition, it is unfair to make patients pay, both in money and time, for a doctor who is just as stupid as them on the matter of medicine, to research the symptoms and then tell them what they already guessed it was instead of using their huge knowledge of all possible outcomes and then going through steps to pinpoint which one it could be. A quantum physicist couldn't survive a day at work if they didn't retain all that information over a long, long time. If companies hiring now can't even have grades as a factor to determine this and, even worse, may be turning down genuinely competent people because some skim readers outdid them via a method so contradictory to the skill-set required to survive in the science industry, this is detrimental in every way imaginable and thus less desirable than the system of forcing people who can't retain but can read super fast to do as bad as they deserve.The entire point of science is to base what you have seen in the past and build on it, and evolve it into a new answer/theory as well as for most jobs, to regurgitate science on a daily basis either to diagnose patients (doctor) or to design a bridge (engineer). There a multitude if science jobs where being a regurgitating robot who can retain information and merely apply it to a situation based on principles form previous examples/questions is exactly what makes those who flourish in the profession as brilliant as they are. As for the more thinking-prone jobs where theories are formed, exams vary greatly in difficulty and there are a multitude of exams, especially at degree level, that require one to use a huge array of retained knowledge and rearrange it into an essay they could never have seen before because the examiners ensured it was a brand new question,even for the Internet. There is still no way to justify letting incompetent skim readers through just to fail the moment that they actually have to rely on retained information over their 30-40-year long career when at the end they are still flicking through page 100 searching for the answer to 'what is Zn?[1]'.The point about pressure is that exam pressure, closed book, simulates the exact form of pressure that professions of science require their workers to undergo on a daily basis. One has to use memory in a time-constrained situation to find an answer based purely on what they already know. Googling and he likes only works if the person is then able to read the Google page and understand the terms on it instead of then having to Google every definition. Exam questions are overall simpler compared to actual work and while immediately converting a page into an exam answer can work, it won't help one in a science profession whatsoever.I have no idea why cramming being impossible is relevant, in fact cramming for an open book exam isn't impossible but the skim-readers would outdo a crammer anyway as their natural talent to read super fast and convert it into an answer would artificially boost them up the bell curve while the crammers, who probably will do slightly worse than if they'd studied well, will have their retention of information not get them as high a grade in the end as their percentage ends up much lower on the bell curve thanks to manic readers outdoing them.I said that the research is open book. However, closed book exams regard the foundation knowledge one must have to first working what to research and then how to research it. If one doesn't have a huge memory bank of what's already been researched, the mistakes that have been made and how to combine previous experiments to formulate the new one, they'll never be a good researcher to begin with. This retention of information is only testable closed book.What good is a researcher who says 'hmm let me research why humans have sex' (or something far more complex) and then Googles it writes a whole essay on it and then says 'aw man it's already been done...' This is why skim reading gurus are useless in the science profession.In conclusion, the evil of letting those more capable at retaining information end up lower on the bell curve than they otherwise would for the sake of allowing those incapable at science to boost their grades via a skill-set so irrelevant to those working in the science profession results in the resolution being declared false.Sources:[1] http://www.rsc.org...