Beats me. A well designed exam asks one to apply knowledge not to regurgitate it. You should be able to look up any of the supporting information but you also need to be able to organize that information.

All of my BSc Applied Physics exams including the final (Exeter Uni. 1977) were open note and this really helped sort the competent students from those who thought that they were at university to learn facts. The latter brought fifty litre rucksacks full of notes in to the finals and without exception either failed entirely or scraped through to third class honours.

They seemed to have not realized that the faculty would not set questions that could be directly answered by looking up the question in one's notes. The best example was the final quantum mechanics paper which did not contain a single question that had a direct answer in the notes we had taken or the textbooks we had used.

My most recent exam was a C# course and that exam was open book. It wasn't as extreme as my QM final but had basically the same idea: apply what you have learnt.