And that's exactly the point! By making sure the student can't edit the entire text once its written, you force him to think about the essay's structure and force him to plan much more before writing :)

Sure, but you know that professionals edit, right? It improves the quality of the product.

If the goal is to assess the ability of the student to produce a professional product, then why prevent them from using AI in the first place? The vast majority of professionals have access to AI nowadays?

Most curricula should probably feature both forms of assessment, demonstrating your knowledge of the basics in a closed book assessment and your ability to produce high quality final products using all resources available to you in take home assignments.

It's not JUST about output, it's also about learning. The output is a way to measure the learning, it's not important of itself except as a reflection of the student's mastery of the curriculum.

You're thinking of the output as the goal rather than as the means to an end.

No, I’m not? As I said, you should assess whether people know the basics (I.e. are they learning) by testing without AI tools available. However, I believe you need to learn how to employ AI tools, just as you need to learn how to use a word processor. And the best way to do that is through experience.

Absolutely! That's why they are students: you learn to walk before you learn to run. Students should be forced to plan their texts and practice getting better at that. Whenever they leave school, they'll be able to write even better texts than the essays.

Honestly, school essays, as a text genre, suck to read. They are not meant to be enjoyable, beautiful texts! Instead, they are meant to help gauge the student's ability at text planning, the quality of their text project, their grammatical knowledge, and orthography.

I must say I'd be open to seeing schools attempting other models, though, and measuring the results thereafter to see in practice what happens when students type their essays instead. In terms of text projects and planning, that could be interesting and train different skills.

If you’re suggesting that the test favors those capable of arranging their thoughts and words before putting pen to paper then.... I’m not sure there’s a problem

You could add someone screaming in their ear to test their focus in strained curcumstances.

And yet strangely this hasn't proved a major impediment to the species at any point in the last ~5000 years...

When I was in grade school the common practice was to use the back page of the exam booklet to do a quick outline (assuming there was no other scrap paper available) and just cross it out when you were done with it. Being able to organize your thoughts and maintain a clear direction in writing 500-1000 words seems like an important thing to test for.