Like many faculty members, Afshin M. Gharib and William L. Phillips have strong preferences for giving certain types of examinations.
Both men, associate professors of psychology at Dominican University of California, have kept up a running debate on the topic. Mr. Gharib likes open-book tests because the scores result in a normal, bell-shaped distribution curve and do not stress out his students.
Mr. Phillips favors tests in which students can prepare a crib sheet with material from the course. He has held fast to the belief that the act of preparing a crib sheet produces an added educational benefit.
Most professors, they acknowledge, go with a third option, the traditional closed-book style, which many see as the most-rigorous of test types.
To help settle their debate, Mr. Gharib and Mr. Phillips conducted a study of their students. The results appear in their paper, “Cheat Sheet or Open-Book? A Comparison of the Effects of Exam Types on Performance, Retention, and Anxiety,” on which they collaborated with Noelle Mathew, an undergraduate student at Dominican. The article was published recently in Psychology Research.
They studied 297 students who took eight sections of an introductory psychology course and 99 students in four sections of a statistics course. Mr. Gharib taught the psychology sections and Mr. Phillips instructed in statistics. They used the same texts, assignments, and exams in each of their sections.
Students in the psychology course took all three forms of tests—open-book, closed-book, and one in which they could prepare a letter-size piece of paper with as much information as they wanted, an approach the researchers called a “cheat sheet” exam.
Students in the statistics course took the open-book and cheat-sheet exams. They did not take a closed-book test because it seemed unrealistic to expect students to remember long formulas, said Mr. Phillips.
Students in the psychology course scored best on the open-book exam, with cheat-sheet test scores coming in slightly lower, and closed-book exams last. Statistics students fared better on the open-book exams than they did on the cheat-sheet test.
“I think I won,” said Mr. Gharib.
Pop Quiz
Two weeks after taking the second of the three tests, the students were given a surprise closed-book quiz to measure how well they had retained the material. To the researchers’ surprise, students retained the material equally well, regardless of the type of exam they had originally taken.
The researchers also found that students who do well on one type of exam also fare well on the other two, a finding that Mr. Gharib said was particularly important.
“Type of exam, it turns out, really is not important,” he said. “You can measure students’ learning and their ability on any type of test you want.”
Mr. Phillips agrees. “It kind of depends on what you want the student to get out of the class and what your expectations are,” he said.
Students also completed a three-question survey about which type of test they thought they would fare best on, which type they would study for, and which they preferred. Students took a pretest measure of anxiety on open-book and cheat-sheet tests.
Not surprisingly, students preferred open-book and cheat-sheet exams over closed-book ones and reported the lowest levels of anxiety when taking open-book exams.
But, again, the results yielded a surprise. Students thought they would study most for the closed-book exams, but that view was not reflected in reports of their actual habits. Students in the psychology class spent the most time studying for the cheat-sheet exam, or more than four hours. Open-book exams yielded slightly fewer hours of study, while closed-book exams resulted in the least amount of time studying, 3.32 hours.
Statistics students, who took only two types of tests, also spent more time studying for cheat-sheet exams.
Another finding weakened Mr. Phillips’s argument for cheat-sheet exams. An independent scorer evaluated the students’ cheat sheets for organization and richness of detail. Higher-scoring cheat sheets, it turned out, had a weak relationship to performance on the exam.
“I was more adamant that the cheat sheet would result in better retention over all, and that wasn’t the case,” he said. “I think I might use more of an open book.”
Both men cautioned against applying their findings too widely. They believe that disciplinary differences may complicate results. They also want to study the effects of take-home exams.
