The science/engineering/math tests I took at Caltech were all open book, open note. They were not about regurgitating facts and formulae. But if you didn't already know them, you didn't have the time to open the book and learn about them.
> The science/engineering/math tests I took at Caltech were all open book, open note. They were not about regurgitating facts and formula.
Yes, you can be a bad engineer even if you pass such tests. Don't underestimate how far mindless pattern matching can take you, you can get pretty high up in international competitions just by dumb pattern matching and very little broader understanding, tests average students can pass are a piece of cake even at MIT level compared to that.
But of course such an engineer can be useful to solve constrained problems, but I wouldn't call them good since they don't really connect to the larger picture so they need a lot of oversight.
