When I was in school, I was lucky enough to have a philosophy teacher who would actually debate things with students. One of my favorite discussions with him wa

When I was in school, I was lucky enough to have a philosophy teacher who would actually debate things with students. One of my favorite discussions with him was about our math classes banning the use of calculators, and his class banning the use of Wikipedia. His argument was these restrictions trained us in the skills we would need to succeed on the exam, where we would not have calculators or Wikipedia to help us. He would intentionally make poor arguments like this with the expectation that we would be able to identify what was wrong; here it was that he was “kicking the can down the road” and was hoping we would then ask, well, why we aren’t allowed to use calculators/Wikipedia in the exam? We did ask that (I think he was proud) and then we had a good discussion of the applicability of the exam to real life, where we concluded that real life circumstances might occur that imitate the restricted conditions of the exam - e.g. you may be in a situation where you don’t have a calculator but still need to do maths, or you may be asked to research something for which a Wikipedia page does not yet exist. Other good arguments I remember being suggested in favor of exams were “the time limit of exams approximates real life time pressure” and “competence in the most restricted form of the aptitude implies competence in less restricted forms, but the reverse is not true”. I get the impression that schools today do not utilize exams like they did back then, which I think is probably a bad thing and definitely makes it harder to catch out ChatGPT-using students.