[okennedy]

Even open book exams can be gamed. There are whole industries set up around enabling in-exam communication (e.g. concealed subvocal mics/headphones) and outsourcing schoolwork.

It is definitely possible to design assessments on which cheating is difficult. For example, oral examinations or personalized per-student projects or exams. The problem is that this style of personalized assessment fundamentally does not scale past a few dozen students in a classroom.

You want a classroom that small, it's going to cost you. Just instructor salaries for would run each student 10-30k per year, and that's before paying for infrastructure (classrooms, tech, offices) and (admittedly not always useful) administration.

[OkayPhysicist]

Smaller class sizes is definitely a huge boon for everybody involved. I went to a mid-sized private uni, where a large class size was maybe in the low 30 students range, and many were closer to 10-15, and the experience was dramatically better than my friends at other universities got. Professors knew the vast majority of us by name, and had at least an approximate idea of your grasp on the course material.

Cheating was solved with a pretty straightforward approach: don't make it trivial to cheat (re-using test questions, question-bank multiple choice tests, etc) to keep the honest students honest, then trust the students. If someone's caught violating that trust, send them to the business school. (I don't know what they did with cheaters in the business school. I assume promote them)

[butterNaN]

> Even open book exams can be gamed

Of course, yes, nothing's perfect. But Open book exams are far better bargain than what the most popular method of exams is as of today.

[warkdarrior]

Would "open book" include access to Google search and to ChatGPT?