Comment by JoeJonathan

A lot of people in this thread are talking about how they did in-person exams, handwritten problem sets in class, etc. This kind of thing is more challenging in the humanities, where the research paper is kind of our bread and butter. A lot of us have since turned to different kinds of assignments, but I am not ready to forego research papers in favor of blue book exams. I think there's some value in having to develop and sustain an argument in conversation with some body of literature (scholarly or otherwise), and that is not easily to replicate with in-person writing, at least at the undergrad level. (Doctoral candidates do this kind of thing all the time in qualifying exams, but that's after years of graduate school and fresh off doing nothing but reading 100+ books over the course of a few months.)