Its not an option for everyone. I had a classmate in undergrad who had a medical condition where they could not take notes by hand. They even had a doctor's note saying that they had to have a laptop in class.
True, but Compuguy was not referring to people with medical conditions in my opinion. He is referring to the "many" that don't want make a concentrated effort to improve their handwriting but could if they did.
If a student has a medical condition that makes it so their handwriting is not legible then they probably had the same issue in HS and should be able to navigate College bureaucracy well enough to get the exemption status.
I should of mentioned it earlier, but I do have a medical condition, which a previous poster mentioned (Dysgraphia). I also did "navigate" the college bureaucracy and sometimes had to push teachers to allow use of a tablet or laptop, even with an exemption.
Not physically able to use hands != perfectly able to use hands but was failed by their elementary school system and now rationalizes that learning to write legibly is somehow a waste of time ;)
Not to be too personal, 99% of college students (including myself back in the day) are lazy rationalizers in some fashion. In my experience it's not until Junior/Senior year that some majors start squeezing that out.
On the other hand, I had some number of years of handwriting class in grade school (Palmer script) and handwriting was consistently my lowest grade as I recall. It's never been good in spite of considerable practice--and it's slowly deteriorated to almost illegible today.
If a student has a medical condition that makes it so their handwriting is not legible then they probably had the same issue in HS and should be able to navigate College bureaucracy well enough to get the exemption status.