Written Exams Should Be Open Book For Science Subjects.

A fundamental issue with the Pro case is that it is forgetting the entire purpose that one sits an exam to begin with.I would like to explain my interpretation of an exam before going further into the formal definition of it.An exam(ination), in my opinion, is a task one undertakes to display their ability to intake information over whatever the period the teaching or training period prior to the exam happened to involve. It displays much more than one's innate intellect but is, nonetheless, bias to those who are more structured and organized by nature and it is true to say that most geniuses end up loathing the education system for how rigid it is and how close-minded it ends up being however most people who fail in the education system are not those who fail to be challenged by it but rather are those either too lazy or those who are genuinely too distracted during the learning process to pass the examination. What is important to realize here is that Pro's system of examination will not analyze the science students' ability to intake information over a given period and reorganize that information into an organized time-restricted answer but rather will bias the entire process to those capable to intake information so phenomenally fast in comparison with their rivals.Now is where I am going to more into the formal definition of exam and explain how the papers are even built in the first place to match the difficulty level of the qualification being earned:For the formal definition of examination, I shall be referring to three different sites and be specifically using the written exam option from the available definitions:“the act or process of testing pupils, candidates, etc., as by questions.”http://dictionary.reference.com...“an exercise designed to examine progress or test qualification or knowledge”http://www.merriam-webster.com...“written exercises, oral questions, or practical tasks, set to test a candidate's knowledge and skill”http://www.thefreedictionary.com...These are the three relevant definitions that I will confine this debate to. I hope that Pro agrees that we are not referring to some general 'examination' here but the specific time-restricted process by which one pursuing a science career of some kind gets their qualification that will later help them to be qualified for it.While it would be true to say that, at the lower end of education, a written examination in a science subject is often a compulsory part of anyone of any career to pass that stage of education, Pro is including all levels of expertise here (I presume even Degree level) thus this is nullified by the fact that Pro is definitely referring to high school and above within the resolution's framework. Whilst I'd be happy to challenge Pro on basic-level examinations in science subjects, I will still be basing the majority of my case on examinations for those actually seeking to go further on to pursue a career involving science of some kind in it.Let us take a typical science-related job such as a doctor, surgeon or nurse. All these jobs require people to go into work every day and use previously stored information, retained over a long period of study, and apply it to a task at hand. Furthermore, they do not simply answer questions in a correctly structured manner but actually have to use the answer immediately in cases where their capability to do so is literally the single factor determining one's survival. Open book exams do not remotely simulate the medical work environment as they do not test any of the skills people use in it. On the other hand, closed-book examinations require people to display that not only they can learn throughout a duration of one, or more, years, but can retain that information to such a level of difficulty that they do better than their rivals who presumably tried just as hard but failed to achieve the desired result.Examinations work on a bell curve, the details of which can be found on this website [http://divisbyzero.com...]. This means that the better one's rivals of that exam do, the higher the grade boundaries are pushed (because presumably the exam was easier than it should have been). If it is a year where many do bad, it is assumed that the exam was harder than it should have been and grade boundaries are subsequently lowered. This does have a fault in that it doesn't take into account that one year there may literally be smarter, or dumber, people than the year before but it overall is how we ensure that the doctor administering your medicine is someone capable of doing so correctly. That is what it boils down to.It doesn't matter if you are analyzing minerals which were extracted by machines designed by engineers who studied an entirely different science to you, you still need to use knowledge that you learned under pressure and retained to prove your worth as a capable individual to pursue such a career path to begin with.The only possible counter argument to this that I would consider fairly valid is that those pursuing research careers in science do all of their jobs open-book. Nevertheless, I have a very good argument against this. How on Earth is one to even know what they are researching, or to even fathom what needs to be discovered, if they haven't got an extremely sufficient foundation of scientific knowledge on which to base their work? PhDs are already open-book and the qualifications below them are not for very good reason; PhDs are for those actually researching, lower qualifications are up to and including all basic knowledge that anyone who would want to research something within that field would need to know in order to know what needs researching and to also have a good memory bank of the failed attempts at discovering the answer prior to their attempt.In conclusion, open book examinations fail to remotely test for the attributes that those seeking science careers would require and they also are severely outshone by the closed book examinations by fairness to those who compensate for slow learning speed by putting in that extra effort to gain knowledge in their own way. Open book exams are not only unfair to those who are slower instinctively yet capable of memorizing all the content by the examination since they make up for it via effort but are also totally insufficient at keeping those less able at science out and letting those more able at science through. Quite frankly, the only relation they have to the real world is those pursuing research careers but the lack of basic knowledge by the time they begin to pursue researching would almost definitely ensure a huge wastage of resources either investigating something that the person didn't bother to remember has already been tried and failed or investigating something the incorrect way because the person never actually understood how advanced experimentation is supposed to work and happened to fluke the exams by flipping back and forth form the index of the book in time to ace it.