My kids (D23 and S26) have both done a lot of handwritten work in class. For my son especially, a lot of his English and Social Studies teachers have gone almost exclusively to in-class writing and presentation rather than take-home writing. I think this has been part of an effort to make it harder for students to use AI, but honestly, I wish it were different – there hasn’t been much in the way of primary research and academic writing. They still do a lot of the work foundational to writing – finding sources, preparing thesis statements and outlines, etc., but the culmination of this work happens in class. These are all AP classes (and honors, when that was the highest level available), so it’s really not about class level. I think my daughter had more take-home writing (this was before AI was the scourge that it is now), but still very few traditional papers. Happily, her college professors assign both traditional papers and in-class writing, and she’s felt prepared for both.
As a history professor, I do assign traditional papers, but I also was one of the dinosaurs who never gave up on blue book exams, because I found that there were some students who did better on exams than on papers, and vice versa. I allow students to bring in cheat sheets, because I am more interested in analysis than memorization (in my intro classes, I give extra credit for cheat sheets, which I admit is basically bribing them to study). When I’ve assigned take-home exams, they’re usually terrible, and increasingly AI-generated. Whereas my students as recently as a few years back were flummoxed at blue book exams and told me I was the only professor they had who assigned them, now they seem more adjusted to these exams,and I think more professors are going back to them.