[Dave D]

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At Caltech, all finals are take-home, and you're told the amount of time you get, whether you get to use a book/calculator, etc. It's just an honor system. The question is completely legitimate.

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Now that just sounds like lazy professors. Who would be dumb enough not to open their book on a take home exam. (or be dumb enough to believe students wouldn't)

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I had take home closed book exams too. Basicaly it's one of those situations where the questions that are asked arent really fact based, so the book doesn't really help, and also it's pretty obvious if you did use the book.

The take home exam is given over basically 24 hours, its pretty long and basically amounts to 3 of 4 long essay questions. Using the book to tell me about Macbeth doesn't really help, saying "on page 35, he says blah blah" doesn't really help for talking about the themes etc. It comes out to being the same thing as writing a 6 page paper or so, except basically you're answering more than one question, and unlike in an exam you can make sure its coherent and does't have spelling mistakes etc, but makes you think about more things than a paper would (because there's a bunch of different questions).

I suppose you could try to read all 12 books that were assigned in that 24 hours and go from there, but its really not gonna help.

Also, people have 4 or so other finals to study for over a week or so, it's bad to spend too much time on one subject so that sort of limits things.

Incidently, the honor code is taken very seriously at WF, which also kind of sucks because if you get accused, there's basically a presumption of guilt.

Davidson has all take home finals iirc, and from what I've heard cheating is rampant, so meh.

Most of my finals were barely proctored if at all. Unproctored exams are pretty common at small liberal arts type schools.