Hi! Nerdy uni student here, it's an 80 people classroom. People just sit in the back and use their phone during paper exams. They then go to class groupchat to boast about how clever they were for coming up with that idea...

Also since professor has actual research to do, exams are proctored by the teaching assistants who frankly don't care. In fact TA's openly use AI to grade homeworks.

May sound slightly biased, but I think the solution is people going "exams were not meant to be part of this system, or at least in the current state they are" and making some reforms.

On one hand, I agree with you. On the other, take home tests and in-person tests are meant to assess different things. In-person are shorter time windows, it assess recall of standard concepts and their application in mostly-already-seen situations. Take home exams are meant to test creativity with the concepts presented in the course. Giving the students the time to work on the problem while doing some additional research to try to figure out the solution.

Ideally, most of your career will involve take-home-like tasks, not in person ones. On top of that, take home favors people with anxiety, that are penalized by in person work.

I wish it was that simple, I really do, but when did handwriting get dropped from the curriculum? Ok slightly hyperbolic, that was the US, still on the UK curriculum. But the importance of it has dropped dramatically.

Even 10 years ago the legibility of student answers was sufficiently awful we were doing exam technique training for students and it has degraded substantially since then.

Have you ever proctored an exam before?

There's the right answer, and then there's the practical answer. This is the former.

They'll just use AI then copy it to paper.