A Devil in Disguise

STORYTIME
Beware of the devil in disguise. This can occur few times in life, but the best well known occurrence  is open book tests. Students know that this inspires teachers to make the test significantly harder than it would have been closed book. I really don't know why my classmates were cheering today when my AP World History told us we could use books on the 70 question test that had to be completed within 60 minutes. As one can infer, the key to this test is speed. HOWEVER, people are so enthralled with this perceived blanket of comfort, they don't realize that it's actually suffocating their personal confidence in their AP World skills as well as killing their chances of actually completing the entire test. Even I can't say that I wasn't tempted by the blanket of comfort, I actually had a book under my desk just in case I wanted to use it during the test. However, since there was one person who wanted the book more than myself, I gave it to them. I thank that person for most likely saving me from this very tempting poison.

ANALYSIS
The reason this type of testing is really inconvenient is because we don't ever use the method of testing with a book. It also provides the person a false sense of security that they have a high accuracy. Even in the event that the accuracy is high, the use of the book searching for the answers is extremely time consuming, forcing you to guess on the last 20 questions. Thus, compromising the final score of the test, and eliminating any data that could be used to find out how much you actually know. Although I wasn't 100% on half the questions, I still scored a 76 (translates to a 4 on the AP exam) without the book which means I knew more than I thought I did. Yay :)