Why not multiple exams? In fact, why not many exams?

Sure, it requires more resources, but it shouldn't require much more:

- We've had multiple exams before AI, and I don't see how AI makes it any harder. Obviously these are closed-book

- Schools should already be banning phones in class (and colleges have insane tuitions, they can afford more exams)

- The students who go out of their way to cheat - as long as they're a minority, let them. Why not? Either they'll fail later in life, or they didn't need to learn the material because they're pathological fakers (even if you won and forced them to learn the material, they'd probably still fake their way out of using it). Then, I doubt you need much proctoring to ensure that most students don't cheat, because most of the smart students are generally smart enough to know that actually learning the material is probably important (or if the material is probably not important, it doesn't matter if the students all cheat...)

Meanwhile, downsides of one exam:

- Disadvantages students who get overly stressed about unrecoverable exams, or have a particularly bad day on the exam

- Many students will blow off the (ungraded) assignments and put off actually learning until the end

- Less graded content (especially if the exam isn't overly long, which would disadvantage some students)

Indeed. Many of my technical undergrad courses were very exam heavy. Typically 3-5 midterms and one final. Sometimes the final was as little as 10% of the grade. The idea was that if you'd done well throughout the semester you can relax during finals weeks.

Homework was assigned but not graded.

Periodic tests is the way to go.

I hated courses where the final was more than 30%. Forget 100%.