AI is accelerating a tech backlash in American classrooms

Handwritten and oral exams are making a comeback.

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Some teachers are requiring students to write exercises by hand and take pen-and-paper tests as they play defence against classroom tech that enables cheating and foments distraction.

(PHOTO: AFP)

A century and a half before Apple marketed iPads to schools, in 1857, a Greek-born Harvard professor, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, held a bonfire of newly introduced “blue books”, bound exam booklets for pen-and-paper tests that (to his ire) were to replace oral recitations. He lost. These booklets would torment generations of American students before yielding in turn to computerised testing.

But now the blue book is making a comeback, with booklet sales more than doubling from 2022 to 2024, according to Circana, a data firm. And oral exams appear ripe for revival, too.

From high school to university, teachers are playing defence against classroom tech that enables cheating and foments distraction.

Literature professor Laura Lomas of Rutgers University now requires students to attend a play whose ending changes every night, so she knows if they were there. She assigns oral presentations rather than more artificial intelligence (AI)-friendly PowerPoints, and allows no bathroom breaks during blue-book exams so students can't peek at their phones.

Ms Sara Brock, a high-school English teacher in Port Washington, New York, requires students to write exercises by hand in class. Associate Professor Justin Reich, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Teaching Systems Lab, says his daughter's middle school has “more or less given up on (assigning) homework other than maths”. Students are told to read instead.