I don't understand.

10 years ago, we wrote exams by hand with whatever we understood (in our heads.)

No colleagues, no laptops, no internet, no LLMs.

This approach still works, why do something else? Unless you're specifically testing a student's ability to Google, they don't need access to it.

I am returning to this model in my classes: pen in paper quizzes, no digital devices. I also do seven equally weighted quizzes to deescalate them individually. I have reduced project/programming weight from 60-80% of my grade to 50% because it is not possible to tell if the students actually did the work.

> This approach still works, why do something else?

One issue is that the time provided to mark each piece of work continues to decrease. Sometimes you are only getting 15 minutes for 20 pages, and management believe that you can mark back-to-back from 9-5 with a half hour lunch. The only thing keeping people sane is the students that fail to submit, or submit something obviously sub-par. So where possible, even for designing exams, you try to limit text altogether. Multiple choice, drawing lines, a basic diagram, a calculation, etc.

Some students have terrible handwriting. I wouldn't be against the use of a dumb terminal in an exam room/hall. Maybe in the background it could be syncing the text and backing it up.

> Unless you're specifically testing a student's ability to Google, they don't need access to it.

I've been the person testing students, and I don't always remember everything. Sometimes it is good enough for the students to demonstrate that they understand the topic enough to know where to find the correct information based on a good intuition.

Open book exams are not a new thing and I've often had them for STEM disciplines (maths and biology). Depending on the subject, you will often fail those unless you had a good prior understanding of the material.

If you can pass an exam just by googling something, it means you're just testing rote-memorization rather, and maybe a better design is needed where synthesis and critical thinking skills are evaluated more actively.

I go to school right now, and most classes actually enforce paper and pencil tests despite how annoying it is to grade and code on.

One potential answer is that this tests more heavily for the ability to memorise, as opposed to understanding. My last exams were over ten years ago and I was always good at them because I have a good medium-term memory for names and numbers. But it's not clearly useful to test for this, as most names and numbers can just be looked up.

When I was studying at university there was a rumour that one of the dons had scraped through their fourth-year exams despite barely attending lectures, because he had a photographic memory and just so happened to leaf through a book containing a required proof, the night before the exam. That gave him enough points despite not necessarily understanding what he was writing.

Obviously very few students have that sort of memory, but it's not necessarily fair to give advantage to those like me who can simply remember things more easily.

I was in university around the same time. While there I saw a concerted effort to push online courses. Professors would survey students fishing for interest. It was unpopular. To me the motivation seemed clear: charge the same or more for tuition, but reduce opex. Maybe even admit more students to just have then be remote. It watered down the value of the degree while working towards a worse product. Why would a nonprofit public university be working on maximizing profit?

I teach at MSc level. My students are scattered around the country and world. This makes hand-written exams tricky. Luckily, the nature of the questions they are asked to solve in the essay I give them following their coursework are that chatbots produce appalling bad submissions.

> 10 years ago, we wrote exams by hand with whatever we understood (in our heads.)

You did, but the best exam I had was open book bring anything. 25 and some change years ago even.

I've also had another professor do the "you can bring one A4 sheet with whatever notes you want to make on it."

I had some take home exams in Physics that you could use internet, books, anything except other people (but that was honor code based). Those were some of the hardest exams I ever took in my life. Pages and pages of mathematical derivations. An LLM with how they can do a pretty good job at constructing mathematics, would actually have solved that issue pretty well.

People really struggle to go back once a technology has been adopted. I think for the most part, people cannot really evaluate whether or not the technology is a net positive; the adoption is more social than it is rational, and so it'd be like asking people to change their social values or behaviors.

I think the key difference is what you're trying to measure

It was the same when I graduated 6 years ago. We had projects to test our ability to use tools and such, and I guess in that context LLMs might be a concern. But exams were pencil and paper only.

Optics.