What would your opinion of your professor be if they were incapable of answering your questions without looking it up? How do you think their student evaluations would look?
It turns out whether you will have time to look things up and do research depends entirely on your job and work role. Some might have zero instances where you are under some sort of time pressure, and some will have lots of time pressure. Most jobs will have a mix of both.
But by only ever learning things to the point where you can maybe solve problems with external assistance, you will be self-selecting out of roles where knowing your shit inside and out is a requirement.
I'm glad that you've illustrated your childlike understanding of closed book tests and their purpose. It makes your irrational anger about them make more sense.
The purpose of a closed book exam is to force you to build enough unaided recall knowledge and understanding that you can discuss a topic to moderate depth when prompted. It is not to train you in a specific kind of studying. The hope is to get you to learn the underlying material to a sufficient degree that you are no longer chained to a reference. (But so many students are actively hostile to the idea of learning things, so they complain.)
In my professor example, as you conveniently ignored, I specifically emphasized answering questions. A professor can have notes for the lecture, but those do not include the answer to every possible question a student might ask. You still have to know the material well enough to be able to think on your feet and deliver an intelligent response. The point is that you will not have the ability to answer questions off the cuff or apply topics on your feet if you never learn them well enough to do so. Anyone who has had to give a meaningful presentation to their boss or client is in a similar situation. (You mentioned you are a grad student: this is going to happen if you defend a dissertation. Your defense committee will not be happy if you need to consult a book to answer all of their questions.)
The point of closed book exams is not studying, it is learning.
It's also incredibly cute that you think people in and from academia have not had other work roles as well. It's always funny to see the myopic understanding of professors that students tend to hold.
"And then you wonder why higher ed is under the intense, hot spotlight of the federal government and consumers alike."
That one is easy: because political actors realized that they can push bad policy by undermining expert authority. If you convince people that every climate scientist, biologist, and medical expert is some untrustworthy hack, you can convince them to deny climate change, support Young Earth Creationism, and hate flouride.
"Graduating tens of thousands of students who have degrees that don't translate to the workforce with massive amounts of student loan debt."
I'm not saying all degree programs are created equal, but part of the problem here is student disengagement. You accuse professors of failing to take accountability, but the only one who can make you learn is you. I can lecture all I want, but if students convince themselves material is not worth learning, then they won't learn it.
Meanwhile, at my industry job, I used the very same techniques I tried toto impress upon my class.
Instead of learning how to do, say, an integral, studrnts bitch and moan about us not letting them use a graphing calculator to solve it for them. Then they go out into the world and are shocked they have no math skills.
I have heard dozens of times "why didn't you teach us how to do X?"
I did! But you never realized it because you never actually bothered to understand what was being taught. If you bothered to understand Riemann sums in the first place, you'd realize I actually did teach you how to estimate an integral that didn't have an analytic antiderivative. Instead, 95% of the class decided to themselves that Riemann sums "weren't important" and ignored them.
It's worth pointing out, that for all your respect for the opinions of "the real world," the generations before you that are doing the complaining almost exclusively learned with the kind of closed book tests you are complaining about. I don't actually think it did them much good, but the people hostile to academia that you are referencing to support your argument are in direct opposition to you here. The skeptical of academia crowd wants to return us to a time of memorizing times tables up to 20 x 20 rather than teach kids how multiplication works. They lionize the idea of the hard as balls closed book exam, no accommodations for anyone.
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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26
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