Probably 80% of the physics courses I've taken (and people that I know have taken) are almost all like this. Open Note and/or Open Note+Homework and/or Open Book (and occasionally open laptop), typically with a class averages of around 40-70% on the exam
In grad school as classes got more difficult, we had take home exams even. I always dreaded these because they were substantially more difficult than a regular exam. Generally if you didn't have the concepts down, having an entire library at your disposal was not helpful in that case.
I did great in exams with cheat sheets, but poorly in the few truly "open book" exams, because I didn't know how to properly prepare for an open book exam. My silly undergrad brain thought "Woohoo, open book, I guess I don't have to study all this stuff, I can just look it up when I get there" which led to two hours of feverishly flipping back and forth in the book.
It often turned into an exercise in finding the extreme bottom limit to how small one could write (and turned me into a fan of Pilot Hi-Tec 0.25mm pens!), so I always wondered how carefully considered the limitation to one sheet was... did they actually try out different limits and choose the one that worked best?
More limitation forces students to think about what they're including instead of just copying the textbook onto paper, but even a slight relaxation to 4-5 pieces of paper would have really helped in many cases, and allowed us to focus more on the material and less on the physical chore of preparation...
Creating a LaTeX template that fits everything on to the sheet was an amazing time saver.
The idea was 1) in the real world, you have reference material which you should know how to use, and 2) test length did NOT include any extra time to look things up.
If you knew the material and just needed a quick check of some detail, you could look it up without any problem because you didn't have to search. On the other hand, if you were trying to teach yourself some concept during the test, the wasted time would probably impact how much of the test you were able to complete.
I liked that system - it seemed rather generous coming from "nothing allowed" tests in earlier schooling, and it had a side benefit of reducing the number of profs that badly reused exam questions or lazily used textbook-provided questions.
/* Yes, this policy caused some of us to find the one printer on campus that printed on A3 paper with duplex support, so we could print an electronic-only reference book at 24 pages/sheet (if I remember correctly...) */
I also majored in ME. Caltech requires 2 years of Physics for everyone.
Would you really want formula pluggers designing life critical systems? Not me.
Book values, however, provide valuable feedback on whether an answer is correct or not. While the book may not provide the right formula for the job, it often provides formulas that "bracket" the right answer, and so can be used as a reasonableness check.
A central part of engineering design are reasonableness checks.
They do use formulas and calculate things, but they do NOT recalculate the constants, even though they may be derived each time. The tensile strength for steel is just assumed, from what I can tell, even though it falls out of tests and formulas itself.
In fact, I would trust the computer better than the deriver. The guy that just plugs it in, in a proven system, is safer to my ears. The guy that recalculates everytime is bound to have false positives and negatives and whatnot in the calculations. A good aphorism is 'A man that has one watch knows the time, a man with 2 is never sure.'
I do agree on the standard values though, it does give a ball park, and that is valuable.
One thing to keep in mind is that the brain power required to do all these calculations simply does not exist. Physicists typically are less then 5% of a undergraduate class, I'd actually argue for less, but I haven't a source. These are the guys that can run the calculations through everytime. However, the need for the various jobs is FAR outstripped by the output. Hence you get engineering and the margin of safety, as we know you can't get the proper people in there, but you have to get someone to check at least something otherwise the people will just make it regardless of safety. And then boom, bob's your uncle, you get the casualty differences between Chinese earthquakes and the 6er in Napa.
Yes, it's not much, but it's better than nothing.
Back in high school (in India), Physics used to be my favorite subject. It demystified the underpinnings of natural phenomena. In fact, Electromagentism was the main reason I decided to major in Electrical Engineering. Unfortunately, the Physics courses in college left a really bad taste in my mouth.