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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
New York State recently banned phones state wide in schools.
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 :-)