One professor of mine let us bring books and notes into our written exams knowing that if you didn't actually do any of the readings or take any notes, those resources wouldn't really help you anyway.
But if you had adequately prepared, the books and notes could really help you craft an excellent written response.
In this scenario, it took the focus off memorizing things and instead focused on understanding the content and being able to communicate something worth reading.
And much closer to real life. Nobody will ding you on the job if you need to look up the implementation of an algorithm or data structure. Knowing which algorithm or data structure is appropriate is far more important.
And sadly so, this is still not the case for job interviews, where they expect you to memorize algorithms you normally search online or refer to your previous implementations.
In my engineering education my favorite and most productive learning came from the professor who assigned graded homework and provided fully worked solutions to the given problems before when the problems were assigned.
You had to do them, you were completely able to just copy the solution, and when you were working on something you got immediate feedback as to whether you were doing it well. If you wanted to learn you could, if you didn’t you wouldn’t. The lack of a week or two of lag between solving a problem and figuring out if you had done it correctly really made a difference.
I was a TA for the department head in CS, and he gave us free reign to handle grading and such however we felt was best. More important things to do, I guess :)
We had Homework, Quizzes, and Tests, 33.33 each. Homework was graded like you said. Quizzes and Tests were open notes but on a relatively tight timescale. If people missed a homework, they could turn it in late for some linearly scaled penalty. If they missed a quiz or test question, they could come in and demonstrate/defend a solution off the cuff during office hours for 70% credit or something similarly high.
Students loved it. They no longer had to stress about getting an A, and they could instead focus on understanding the material, since that was the easiest way to (eventually) get the points.
I will say, though, this strategy was very time consuming for a large class. It also requires the TAs to have mastery of the material, which (shocker) is unfortunately not all that common.
Through a number of classes I took online and in person with online homework, the immediate feedback was the one thing I really appreciated.
Statics is very much a class where the same basic concepts are applied tons of times in different ways, and you kind of need to see and do a lot of problems to get good. My professor had us do online homework with unlimited attempts, but we had to submit our hand written work as well. Even though that class was entirely online, I felt very confident applying what I learned on projects.
The immediate feedback was 10x better than having the week or two of lag, and 9x better than having the answer on the back of the book because I never ran out of problems to try.
But if you had adequately prepared, the books and notes could really help you craft an excellent written response.
In this scenario, it took the focus off memorizing things and instead focused on understanding the content and being able to communicate something worth reading.