system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I think all non-specialized academic tests should be "open book", CMV.

I believe the fundamental purpose of education should be to teach students how to think critically, to find, synthesize, and properly use data, and how to determine what constitutes a reliable source of information.

Therefore, I think the U.S. education system, from kindergarten through university, should adopt the practice of allowing students to use whatever material sources the instructor(s) used to create the exams, while the student is taking it.

I think reasonable exceptions could be made for exams that are highly specific to a field of knowledge (e.g. medical, legal, etc), but that for general purpose testing across standardized subjects (math, science, social studies, etc), they should all be open-book.

In my opinion, the current testing model only establishes how good a student is at rote memorization. CMV?
gpt
I'll only respond to "the current testing model only establishes how good a student is at rote memorization" -- and assert that having an open book test can have exactly the same effect, which is just rote copying without understanding. 

I fully agree that there are situations where an open book, or open notes, or "one equation page" is exactly the right approach. No need to memorize a bunch of equations to prove that you know how to use them -- often it's much more important to understand which equations apply in which scenarios, and prove that you can go through the exercise of making connections between them and appropriately applying them throughout a problem.

However, there are a lot times where an open-book test would have the opposite effect. You must understand that knowledge and wisdom is not the sum of knowledge at your fingertips (otherwise we could all be geniuses with a wikipedia query not far off), but rather the CONNECTIONS we make between concepts and facts. If a test on the Civil War asks for the causes of the civil war, and you open your book and just copy down the subheadings for the chapter "causes", you'll get the question right but by not *understanding* the causes you'll never make connections with the economy panics at the same time in another course, or draw parallels to more contemporary events, and so on. This becomes even more important as later education builds on existing beds of knowledge -- if you're taking physics, are you going to haul around your calculus book because you never really learned how to integrate? And then are you also going to carry around a trig book because you just copied things out of tables? For higher-level learning, you need a foundation, and you won't have it if you just copied things down.

tl;dr: There's really no point to education if you think it's just a collection of facts to be memorized, and there's no point to education if you think it's just a collection of facts to be referenced.