Colleges Are Taking the Laptops Away. Your Fall Exams May Be on Paper.
If you were planning to spend fall semester typing your notes with a chatbot open in the next tab, a lot of professors have quietly made other plans for you.
On July 9, the University of Chicago Law School published an AI strategy with a line students noticed immediately: laptops, tablets and phones will be banned from the classroom in all nine core first-year courses, from Civil Procedure to Contracts to Criminal Law.
Exams in those courses happen in the room, with no internet, no files, no apps. Dean Adam Chilton's argument is that a lawyer who cannot think without a machine is not much of a lawyer.
There are exactly three ways around it. A professor can appoint a "scribe" who types notes for the whole class, devices are allowed for things like in-class polling, and students with disability accommodations keep theirs. That is the entire list.
Princeton just ended a 133-year-old promise
The bigger shock is not at a law school. Princeton has run on an honor code since 1893: no proctors in the room, students police themselves. As of July 1, that is over. The faculty voted to proctor every in-person exam, the largest change to the system in 133 years.
Dean Michael Gordin's reasoning is almost sympathetic. Cheating used to look like cheating. Now it fits on a phone under a desk, where no classmate can see it. Professor Kim Lane Scheppele put it plainly: AI "was the breaking point."
The Daily Princetonian's own survey explains why nobody fought very hard for the old system. Forty-five percent of graduating seniors said they knew about an honor code violation and never reported it. 0.4% reported one.
Blue books are having a moment
Those flimsy stapled booklets your parents wrote exams in? Campus stores cannot keep them in stock.
The Wall Street Journal reported blue book sales up more than 30% at Texas A&M and about 50% at the University of Florida for the 2024-25 school year, and 80% at Berkeley across two years. At UVA, the bookstore says sales climbed another 27% this past April compared with the April before.
A booklet, a pen, and a professor watching. It turns out that is the one exam format nobody has figured out how to prompt their way through.
And then there is the oral exam
At Cornell, biomedical engineering professor Chris Schaffer sits students down for a 20-minute oral defense of the work they submitted. His summary is the sentence to remember: "You won't be able to AI your way through an oral exam."
At NYU, professor Panos Ipeirotis went further and cloned his own voice into an AI agent that quizzes students out loud. He says he does not trust written assignments anymore. So yes: an AI now gives the exam that exists because of AI.
The part everyone gets wrong
This is not schools banning AI. Chicago says so directly: being AI-resilient "does not mean trying to prevent all student use of AI." Their writing program has you draft cold, then layers AI on top for research and revision, because employers expect you to use it well.
The strict end of the spectrum exists too. Berkeley Law bans generative AI from outlining, drafting, revising, translating or editing anything you hand in for credit, and will not let you upload your course materials into a chatbot at all.
So the rule taking shape is not "no AI." It is: prove you can do it without the machine, and then you may use the machine.
What this means for your fall
Assume closed-book. In person, handwritten and proctored is the default again. Studying until you actually know it is back on the menu.
Practice out loud. If you cannot explain your answer to a person in two minutes, you do not have it. That used to be a study tip. Now it is the exam.
Your hand will hurt. Handwriting speed is a real constraint again, and it is free to train.
Get the rule in writing. Policies differ from professor to professor. A global survey of 45,398 students found 76% have never had any AI training, and one in four students at schools with AI bans use it weekly anyway. Do not guess where the line is. Ask.
None of this came out of nowhere. It is the same crackdown behind the Brown professor who says most of his class cheated on a take-home exam, and the reason AI detection in admissions is such a mess. The take-home exam had a good run. It is being sent home.