20 years ago this was not unheard of. One exam we had to translate C code to assembly for one of the exercises, convert to numbers to IEEE754 representations and similar, both tasks where access to a laptop would make it possible to cheat. Also had to modify some small computer architecture diagrams if I recall correctly.

For the linear algebra written exam it didn’t work as if you learned to solve the 4 previous years exams, you could be sure most of it was familiar, so you could just prepare for a few standard exercises without really understanding the content.

Our advanced algorithm course used a bit of a combination, with a project take home exam (knapsack like optimization problem - competing for the fastest implementation) combined with a two hour written exam with multiple choice answers, but again only with books, pencil and paper to get to the right answer. This I think could work today, having both the opened ended project + some multiple choice with pencil/paper.