alt Hacker NewsTimed tests encourage wrote memorization and reflexive knowledge. They don't encourage what is reflective of the modern real world knowledge recollection. In almost all scenarios, you have a book to reference for knowledge, much less search engines (and now LLMs). Almost nothing is memorized today, in the work world. What you know, in my experience, comes from frequent usage. Your timespan to work on most things is on the order of days, not minutes or an hour.
Tests should be open book, open notes, and an extensive amount of time to do the test. The questions should be such that they demonstrate an understanding of the material, not just how well you can parrot back information.
Whilst I would love tests to be open internet, this lends itself to very easy cheating. The material being taught and what notes you take about it should be enough to answer any questions posed to you about the material. Especially those that demonstrate an understanding of the material.
Sort of. There are some things that a person entering a field is expected to know without needing to look them up, because if you don't know it you won't develop good intuition or be able to execute your work in a timely manner. Most of the stuff you learn in your freshman year is this type of thing, while the later years tend to have more open-book tests.
This is also the kind of thing that you check for in an interview - somebody who needs to look up how to write a for loop isn't going to get hired as a C programmer, and somebody who isn't familiar with Ohm's law will flunk their electronics interview. So there's a very pragmatic reason to make sure that students have the basics memorized.