For most of the last two decades, the direction on college campuses was obvious. More laptops, more online submissions, more of the coursework living in the cloud. That pendulum is now swinging hard the other way.
This fall, a growing number of professors are asking students to close the laptop, put the phone in the bag, and pick up a pen. Papers are being written by hand in the classroom. Exams are proctored at schools that went a century without proctors. And some students are now defending their work out loud, face to face with the professor.
In all of our recent visits to college campuses, we can tell you this is not a passing quirk. It’s a real shift in how colleges measure learning, and it has direct implications for how your high schooler should be preparing right now.
What’s actually happening on campus
The changes fall into four buckets, and many professors are combining them.
1. The blue book comeback. The thin, lined exam booklets nearly disappeared during the pandemic, when testing moved online and sales collapsed, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Now they’re back. Professors in English, communications, philosophy and political science are swapping take-home essays for handwritten, in-class writing. At Middlebury, a longtime political science professor told the student paper that colleagues who once relied on take-home exams are switching to blue books. At Notre Dame, one syllabus announced that at least two papers would be handwritten in class, and thanked AI for the change.
2. Proctors at honor-code schools. This one surprised me. Princeton faculty voted to require proctoring for all in-person exams starting July 1, 2026, the biggest change to an honor system that dates to 1893, as reported by The Daily Princetonian. Stanford, whose honor code has long kept faculty out of exam rooms, has moved in the same direction.
3. Oral exams. Once rare in American undergraduate education, oral exams are spreading. The Washington Post found professors using them in religious studies, engineering, computer science, communications, and even business classes of 600 students. Fortune reports that Penn now pairs written papers with oral defenses in some seminars, and Cornell runs faculty training on how to give them.
4. Device-free classrooms. The University of Chicago Law School now bars laptops, tablets and phones in first-year classes, gives exams in class without internet access, and requires students to discuss their research papers with professors to confirm they wrote them, according to Futurism. Individual professors at schools like Boston College and Rutgers have adopted their own phone and laptop bans.
Why the pendulum swung
The short answer is that a finished paper no longer proves a student learned anything.
In an Inside Higher Ed–College Pulse survey, 85% of college students said they had used AI in their coursework, and about a quarter admitted using it to complete assignments outright, as eWeek reported. Nearly 30% of students themselves said colleges should redesign assessments to resist AI.
The tools meant to catch AI writing haven’t solved it. Clay Shirky, NYU’s vice provost for AI and technology in education, wrote that AI detectors produce too many false positives to be trusted, and that encouraging “engaged” AI use didn’t stop students from outsourcing papers, per Fortune. His recommendation: lean on oral instruction and examination, methods that go back centuries.
So professors are doing the one thing AI can’t fake. They’re watching students think in real time.
This isn’t a war on AI
Here’s the part families often miss: most of these schools are not banning AI. They’re separating learning with AI from proving what you know without it.
The same UChicago Law policy that removed laptops from first-year classrooms openly encourages students to use AI as a study partner, for example to turn class notes into practice questions. Students are getting a two-part message: use AI to learn, then show us you actually learned.
The shift has real critics. Axios notes that timed, handwritten exams can disadvantage multilingual writers and students who need accommodations, and that employers increasingly want graduates comfortable with AI. A Berkeley computer science professor told The Chronicle he sees the blue book revival as a retreat.
Our opinion is that the pendulum will settle somewhere in the middle, but it won’t swing all the way back. Students who can think, write and speak without a screen, and who also use AI well, will have the advantage in college and after it.
What your high schooler should be doing now
The students who struggle with this shift won’t be the ones who lack talent. They’ll be the ones who never practiced working unplugged. Five habits to build before freshman year:
- Write by hand, on the clock. Practice 45-minute essays with a pen and a prompt they haven’t seen. Stamina and organization under time pressure are skills, and they improve with reps.
- Take notes by hand. It forces students to process and summarize as they listen, which is exactly what in-class exams test.
- Practice explaining out loud. Ask your student to walk you through an argument from a paper or a concept from chemistry at dinner, then ask a follow-up. If they can defend it to you, they can defend it to a professor.
- Use AI as a tutor, not a ghostwriter. Generating practice questions or getting feedback on a draft is smart. Letting AI write the draft builds nothing they’ll be able to use in a proctored room.
- Read long-form, offline. Close reading of full books and articles, without skimming tools, is the foundation for every handwritten essay and oral exam ahead.
These habits pay off before college, too. The same authentic voice that holds up in a blue book is the voice admissions readers want to hear in an application essay.
Questions to ask on your next campus visit
AI policy now varies by school, by department, and often by individual professor. It’s worth asking about directly:
- How are most first-year courses assessed: take-home papers, in-class writing, or oral exams?
- Does the school have a campus-wide AI policy, or is it left to each professor?
- Are laptops and phones allowed in lecture?
- How are accommodations handled for timed, handwritten exams?
The answers tell you a lot about a school’s academic culture, and about how ready your student will need to be on day one.
If you’d like help thinking through how this shift affects your student’s preparation, major or college list, our team of dedicated advisors is here to help. Schedule a consultation and we’ll start with where your family is today.
