Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

This is the obvious solution to chatgpt essays. You could also just add more lab sections to CS classes, and force students to do assignments with no access to AI.

When I took physics we had weekly 3.5 hour lab sections. That should be enough for most CS assignments.

There are many subskills that you must be proficient in without tools, before you can learn more interesting skills. You need to know how to do multiplication by hand before you rely on a calculator. If you can't do multiplication with a calculator, you're not going to be able to make sense of the concepts in Algebra.

Why should other subjects be any different?

As someone whose college papers always went through multiple drafts, I genuinely hope that the "joy" the author feels doesn't get in the way of teaching writing skills.

And, as someone who got paid minimum wage to proctor tests in college, I couldn't keep a straight face at this:

> The most cutting-edge educational technology of the future might very well be a stripped-down computer lab, located in a welcoming campus library, where students can complete assignments, by hand or on machines free of access to AI and the internet, in the presence of caring human proctors.

I think the author's leaning heavily on vibes to do the convincing here.

Exactly, this is the reason why I struggle with this sort of solution to the problems we are all facing in education currently. On the surface it seems to make sense, but the blue book exam is entirely artificial and has basically no relationship to real world skills (subconsciously, even the quality of student handwriting handwriting could influence how graders assess blue books). Even leaving AI aside, anyone writing anything nowadays is using Google and Wikipedia and word processors, so why constrain those?

Oxford and Cambridge have a "tutorial" system that is a lot closer to what I would choose in an ideal world. You write an essay at home, over the course of a week, but then you have to read it to your professor, one on one, and they interrupt you as you go, asking clarifying questions, giving suggestions, etc. (This at least is how it worked for history tutorials when I was a visiting student at an Oxford college back in 2004-5 - not sure if it's still like that). It was by far the best education I ever had because you could get realtime expert feedback on your writing in an iterative process. And it is basically AI proof, because the moment they start getting quizzed on their thinking behind a sentence or claim in an essay, anyone who used ChatGPT to write it for them will be outed.