Bluebooks are cramping our style. Literally. Writing intensive, three-hour handwritten exams inevitably leads to painful hand cramps, limiting students’ ability to perform well and fully demonstrate what has been learned. Compounding this problem is the fact that students frequently find themselves facing multiple exams in a short time span — experiences of two back to back three-hour exams are by no means rare — and six hours of continuous scribbling would surely lead to sore abductor policies, aching joints and substandard work. Perhaps it is time for our teaching faculty to see that if they really want the best demonstrated results, they should allow students to type, rather than handwrite, their exams.

The advantages of typed exams outweigh, handily, the disadvantages. The computer has been for years now the primary mode of work in this day and age. Barring occasions when we draw graphs or write formulas, students of our generation feel most comfortable working in a digital environment. When typing an exam, students fully utilize the flexibility of word processing to outline their responses, restructure, skip questions and return to them. The quality of writing is likely more sophisticated than what is produced when one is asked to handwrite pages and pages (legibly, if you please) in a limited timeframe.

Some professors already allow students to type their exams. In small seminars especially, students may be left alone to type, letting them write significantly more with much less throbbing hand pain. At the end of the exam period, students simply email in their final exams with a written Honor Code statement at the bottom. The result is a more agreeable exam experience for students and an easier grading experience for professors.

There are those who might argue that allowing students laptops for their finals would represent too strong a temptation, tantamount to encouraging unprecedented levels of cheating. However, Stanford proudly boasts of its Honor Code: “The faculty on its part manifests its confidence in the honor of its students by refraining from proctoring examinations and from taking unusual and unreasonable precautions to prevent...dishonesty.”

If professors are concerned, there is always the option of blocking Internet access for the examination room, although students from potentially reading notes offline. Yet students, despite being discouraged from bringing physical notes to exams for pre-test studying to eliminate temptation, still cheat. After all, is the siren song of Google or Wikipedia that much more enticing than a complete study guide resting below one’s chair or painstakingly inscribed along the (sleeve-covered, no doubt) forearm? While letting students type their exams on laptops does increase outlets for cheating, if professors and students truly believe in their vaunted Honor Code, they should have nothing to fear.

Unless one is taking ATHLETICS150: Total Body Workout, the purpose of exams is to test for knowledge, not stamina and endurance. Hand cramps should not prevent a student from doing his or her best work on an exam. The only thing left is to go from digital to digital on our exams — it’s the right thing to do.