External Aids Do you allow students to use any external reference aids on exams? (For example, open book, open notes, student supplied note pages or formulas, instructor supplied note pages.)

For instructor supplied aids, please describe. For any student supplied aids, what restrictions do you enforce? (For example, number of pages, content such as not allowing worked out examples, authorship such as personally generated vs. photocopied.)

I did not allow students to use their texts during exams. When I initially tried open-book exams, I found that nervous students tended to spend too much time "flipping" through their texts, as though the exact answers to my items must be somewhere in the text. Students also did not study as much as when the exams were closed book.

After trying a number of things, I settled on allowing students to bring to exams up to five pages of notes that they had created, all notes and examples I had distributed (which included copies of the overheads I used during class as the basis for my presentations and the two concept maps I created that summarized the course), their homework assignments, and calculators. Students spent significant amounts of time creating their five pages of notes. That process served as a good learning and review activity since students had to identify important concepts and their interrelationships to create useful notes. To be useful, all of their materials had to be organized prior to the tests, again forcing students to identify important concepts and their interconnections.

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