Legal Commentary

I've long been convinced that my students would do better in law school if they left their laptops at home and came to class with a pencil and notebook.  I took notes the old-fashioned way in law school and have no regrets about the results.

But when it came time for final exams, I dragged out the laptop.  I liked the clean, typed version of the answer and the ease of editing by cutting and pasting.   And of course I could type much more quickly than I could handwrite, even if the laptop seemed rather uncomfortable and unfamiliar.  As a professor, I'm equally a fan of typed exams, finding them much easier to read than the handwritten ones.  

So a question for those professors who have advocated banning laptops in class: Do you also support banning laptops for the writing of final exams?  Is there a principled distinction between classroom laptop usage and final exam usage?  Many of the reasons I like to read typed final exams are the same reasons advanced by my students to support laptops in class.  I worry that it's a bit presumptuous of me to say they're wrong about class notes, when I clearly prefer the laptop product on final exams.