- Many US high schools and universities are restoring blue books: handwritten exams and oral quizzes to combat generative AI cheating; blue book sales more than doubled between 2022 and 2024, according to Circana.
- Instructors at Rutgers require students to attend performances with an ending that changes nightly to prove they actually attended; oral presentations are prioritized over PowerPoint, which is easily supported by AI.
- High school teachers in New York mandate in-class essay writing; at the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, the number of teachers reducing homework (except for math) increased sharply, requiring students to only read books.
- Intelligent survey in 2023: 66% of teachers changed assignments because of ChatGPT; 76% switched to handwritten assignments; 87% added oral presentations.
- EdWeek survey: 43% of teachers want students to solve math problems with pencil and paper right in class to avoid using AI; 56% consider laptops/tablets a major source of distraction.
- This trend is spreading to wealthy countries: Sweden banned digital technology for young children starting in 2023, returning to paper books and handwriting; Denmark and Finland are doing similarly.
- Cheating is not new, but the increase in scale is sharp: MIT recorded students using AI for “every final year assignment.” One student even cited a professor’s research paper that the AI fabricated.
- Research shows that technology supports algebra learning, but its effectiveness in other fields is still weak; conversely, handwriting helps increase memory and thinking.
- Teachers want to “go back to basics,” but public universities lack teaching assistants to implement large-scale in-person exams.
- Educated wealthy parents tend to want less edtech; the digital divide is reversing: 58% of Hispanic and 53% of Black teenagers are “almost always online,” compared to 37% of white teenagers.
- Some schools use the entire class time for handwriting to reduce distraction from the “digital heat-seeking missile” that is capturing students’ attention.
📌 Summary: US schools are sharply increasing the use of handwriting and oral quizzes as 76% of teachers switch assignments to manual form, 87% add oral presentations, and 56% report that devices cause distraction. Widespread AI cheating forces classrooms to return to a less technology-dependent model. The cognitive benefits of handwriting and the pressure to manage cheating are causing the “de-digitization” movement to spread across the US and Europe.
