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AI is accelerating a tech backlash in American classrooms
Handwritten and oral exams are making a comeback.
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From high school to university, teachers are playing defence against classroom tech that enables cheating and foments distraction.
PHOTO: AFP
The Economist
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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.
