In 1857, a century and a half before Apple sold the iPad to schools, Greek-born Harvard professor Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles held up a bonfire for the newly introduced “Blue Book,” a bound exam booklet for pen-and-paper tests that (to his fury) replaced oral recitation. he lost. These booklets tormented generations of American students before succumbing to computerized tests. But now blue books are making a comeback, with booklet sales more than doubling from 2022 to 2024, according to data firm Circana (see chart). And oral exams also seem ripe for a revival.
From high school to college, teachers are defending against classroom technology that enables cheating and distracts. Laura Lomas, a literature professor at Rutgers University, is now asking her students to participate in a play with a different ending each night so she knows if they were there. She assigns oral presentations rather than AI-enabled PowerPoints, and doesn’t allow bathroom breaks during Blue Book exams to prevent students from snooping on their phones. Sara Block, a high school English teacher in Port Washington, New York, asks her students to handwrite practice questions during class. Justin Reich, director of the MIT Institute for Educational Systems, said his daughter’s middle school has “more or less given up.” [assigning] Homework other than math. ” Students are asked to read instead.
It is highly likely that these reductions in personnel will continue to increase. In a 2023 study by research organization Intelligent, 66% of high school and college instructors said they changed their assignments because of ChatGPT. Of those that change, 76% require or will require handwriting. Additionally, 87% said they need or plan to add an oral presentation element. A survey from the same year by the EdWeek Research Center found that 43% of educators believe students should use pencil and paper to solve math problems in class to demonstrate that they are not using AI. Stanford University’s pilot program also has proctors wandering around classrooms to monitor exams. It’s so bizarre.
Isabel Dans Álvarez de Sotomayor, an educationist at Spain’s University of Santiago de Compostela, said the battle over classroom technology in the United States is also escalating in other wealthy countries. As poorer countries rush to digitize, richer countries invest in more digital infrastructure while restricting technology in the classroom. After initially going all-in on technology, Sweden banned digital tools for young children in 2023, now emphasizing physical textbooks, handwriting and reading. Danish and Finnish schools have the same idea.
The reason is not just ChatGPT and the amount of fraud it enables. Teachers are also concerned about distraction. Another study from EdWeek Research Center found that 56% of educators said their laptop, tablet, or desktop will be their primary source of distraction in 2025. At Bowdoin College, a private liberal arts college in Maine, the dean said that even before “the recent proliferation of AI,” “many faculty were already marking their classrooms as largely device-free spaces.”
Cheating is nothing new. In a study 10 years ago, 87% of high school students admitted to cheating at least once in the previous month, and researchers found that rate has actually decreased since then. But since the advent of advanced AI, “the scale of fraud has changed dramatically,” says MIT’s Reich. “We do countless interviews with all kinds of kids, and they say things like: [of high school] I’ve never done my homework. “It’s no different at the university level. One student even cited my paper that the AI had created from scratch,” says Lomas.
Although rigorous research shows that classroom technology helps students learn algebra, there is scant evidence that it improves outcomes in other areas. In contrast, the cognitive benefits of handwriting are gaining new respect beyond the humanities. Computer science teachers at New York’s Hunter College High School recently brought back handwriting to coding assignments because it helps with memory and critical thinking.
But not everyone who wants to go old school can do so. Parents often cannot easily opt out of educational technology. And while there is agreement that teachers need to “get back to basics” by prioritizing original, in-person, pen-and-paper testing, large public universities are not providing the resources to match the challenge, such as hiring enough teaching assistants, said Derek Vaillant, a communications and media professor at the University of Michigan. Administrators are “speaking from both sides.”
Ann Maheu, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies technology use among adolescents, said that more educated and affluent parents want to reduce the use of technology in the classroom. According to a December 2024 Pew Research Center report, 58% of Hispanic teens and 53% of Black teens report using the internet most of the time, compared to 37% of white teens. She points out that the digital divide has been reversed.
This change requires us to rethink the purpose of our classroom time. At Hunter College, 11th grade English teachers were assigned to write five literary responses by hand, each taking one hour to write. Previously, Reich said, it wasn’t considered a good use of teachers’ efforts. But today, with digital “heat-seeking missiles” gaining traction, “the best thing we can do in the classroom may be to give young people quiet, undistracted time.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article described Derek Vaillant as a history professor.
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