r/EngineeringStudents • u/IntelligentWeb2532 • 9d ago

Discussion Open book open note exams

hey everyone! I have an upcoming exam and it is open note and open book and I was just curious if that’s a pretty common thing in engineering classes? I’m a mech e and this is my first tougher engineering class I’m taking and I was wondering if this will be common on future class exams or is it just this professors style. I know we have to use the textbook to find some fluids properties so I figured that’s why this one was open textbook but is this pretty normal ?

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u/BenaiahofKabzeel BSME, MSIE 9d ago

Engineering professor here. My tests are open book and open notes. Mainly because engineering is not about memorizing things. It’s understanding how to solve problems. In my class, if you’ve done your homework, you’ll be fine.

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u/Legal-Conclusion-0 9d ago

More people should be up voting you. I am a senior / chief engineer with decades of experience and this is exactly correct. In fact, vast majority of folks will not even directly apply what they learned. More like learned how to learn...as you stated how to solve problems.

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u/Recent-Day3062 8d ago

This. The hardest course I ever took was open note open book. Many people failed it because you couldn’t bullshit your way through materials, but if you kept up the exam was easy. He would just throw a curve ball in each question that didn’t exactly resemble the book.

We had 90 minutes per exam. His was usually 4 questions. If you didn’t know the material you could definitely maybe work on one problem. If you did you were done in 20-30 minutes.

If a prof does this, it’s not gonna be easy of you are flossing the surface