> Actually, it's open-note. But we had a few open-books, too, which I thought was incredibly stupid.

Open-book tests (properly written ones, anyway) work on the principle of "It's not what you've got, it's what you do with it".
To do well, you've got to be able to understand the question, work out what to look up in the book, and figure out how to apply that to answering the question.

Paul