[wffurr]

Yesterday's Doonesbury was on point here: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/23

Andrej and Garry Trudeau are in agreement that "blue book exams" (I.e. the teacher gives you a blank exam booklet, traditionally blue) to fill out in person for the test, after confiscating devices, is the only way to assess students anymore.

My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come very soon. I hope his school district is prepared. They recently instituted a district-wide "no phones" policy, which is a good first step.

[phantasmish]

Blue book was the norm for exams in my social science and humanities classes way after every assignment was typed on a computer (and probably a laptop, by that time) with Internet access.

I guess high schools and junior highs will have to adopt something similar, too. Better condition those wrists and fingers, kids :-)

[eitally]

I'm oldish, but when I was in college in the late 90s we typed a huge volume of homework (I was a history & religious studies double major as an undergrad), but the vast majority of our exams were blue books. There were exceptions where the primary deliverable for the semester was a lengthy research paper, but lots and lots of blue books.

[nradov]

Oh how I hated those as a student. Handwriting has always been a slow and uncomfortable process for me. Yes, I tried different techniques of printing and cursive as well as better pens. Nothing helped. Typing on a keyboard is just so much faster and more fluent.

It's a shame that some students will again be limited by how fast they can get their thoughts down on a piece of paper. This is such an artificial limitation and totally irrelevant to real world work now.

[o11c]

Obviously the solution is to bring back manual typewriters.

[wffurr]

Maybe this is a niche for those low distraction writing tools that pop up from time to time. Or a school managed Chromebook that’s locked to the exam page.

[nmfisher]

That was how I took most of my school and university exams. I hated it then and I'd hate it now. For humanities, at least, it felt like a test of who could write the fastest (one which I fared well at, too, so it's not case of sour grapes).

I'd be much more in favour of oral examinations. Yes, they're more resource-intensive than grading written booklets, but it's not infeasible. Separately, I also hope it might go some way to lessening the attitude of "teaching to the test".

[wffurr]

We had orals for graded programming assignments in graduate school. You had to present your solution to a panel and defend it. Some of my classmates really struggled with anxiety in front of the panel and took any question, however mild, as intense personal criticism.

Maybe this is a case for "learning styles", but it's probably logistically prohibitive to offer both options.

[zahlman]

> My 7 year old hasn't figured out how to use any LLMs yet, but I'm sure the day will come very soon. I hope his school district is prepared. They recently instituted a district-wide "no phones" policy, which is a good first step.

This sounds as if you expect that it will become possible to access an LLM in class without a phone or other similar device. (Of course, using a laptop would be easily noticed.)

[wffurr]

The phone ban certainly helps make such usage noticeable in class, but I'm not sure the academic structure is prepared to go to in-person assessments only. The whole thread is about homework / out of class work being useless now.

[Fomite]

In the process, we lose both the ability to accommodate students, or ask questions that take longer than the test period to answer.

All for a calculator that can lie.

[ecshafer]

New York State recently banned phones state wide in schools.