So the students are disallowed or discouraged from learning how to use tools like AI in the courses they take?

Student are neither disallowed or discouraged from learning them. The are not allowed to use them during unrelated test.

Why is the test unrelated to learning methods?

Should we give grade students calculators on their tests that ask for the result of 1+1? Or 10x3?

This follows the same logic as banning calculators when teaching people basic arithmetic. When something is a replacement for your learning, it should be banned, and when it is an augmentation, it should be encouraged.

You may think it's ridiculous, but many people today can't calculate a 20% tip or add two prices together without a calculator because the constant use of calculators has caused their arithmetic skills to atrophy. This seems like a silly gripe, except a lot of other skills are built around these basic ones: for arithmetic, the ability to estimate the cost or time taken to do something is all based on tricks you learn when you are trying to learn mental math. Society is not worse off for this (enough of us still know how to do these things), but many people are poorer, both intellectually and monetarily, due to a lack of arithmetic skills. And no, this lost knowledge of arithmetic is not replaced by a knowledge of higher math - it tends to come with a fear of it.

The same applies with text-generating AI. In terms of writing, if you don't learn to write dumb essays about books, skills like learning to construct an argument are much harder to pick up. For people writing code, learning to slog through writing and debugging a doubly linked list (something ChatGPT can reliably generate for you today) leads you to later being able to slog through debugging B-trees or lock-free queues (which ChatGPT definitely cannot write for you).

I think there is a very compelling argument along these lines for low-level courses to ban AI tools. However, higher-level courses probably should allow students to add them to their repertoire, where they are an aid and not a crutch. This follows how mathematicians and engineers learn to use calculators and computer algebra tools, which seems to work well.

I don’t think it ridiculous at all. I’m not sure if your comment was an argument, a counter-argument or just a comment.

>people today can't calculate a 20% tip

Earlier this week, I spent several minutes talking one of my co-workers through how I 'did math in my head' to figure out my half of the 20% tip we were leaving for lunch. Even something as rudimentary as moving the decimal place over one and doubling the result seemed like wizardry to them.

They aren't dumb. They've literally just never thought one second past reaching for a calculator. Which is kind of scary, because it means they have no way of sanity checking any numbers they come up with.

Most people today can't make fire by hand either because we have tools for it.

It's a good thing that the skills involved in making fire by hand don't transfer to disciplines that matter. The same cannot be said for arithmetic and writing.

I know a person who does interviews for programming positions who asks "what is 20% of 20,000?" The ones who are flummoxed by it are no hires. So are the ones who pull up a calculator app on their phone.