How to study with AI when exams go closed book

The short version: assessment is moving back towards work you do unaided, so the AI worth keeping is the one that leaves something behind in your head. A tool that hands you a finished answer has become a liability at exactly the moment your grade is decided. A tool that makes you able to produce the answer yourself is the opposite.

Here is what changed this summer.

The exam room is being locked again

In May, Princeton’s faculty voted, with a single vote against, to require an instructor present at every in-person undergraduate exam from 1 July 2026. That ends a practice dating to 1893, when students themselves petitioned to get proctors out of the room. The stated reason was blunt: AI and small devices have made misconduct much harder for other students to observe, and therefore to report.

It is not one university and it is not only America. The law school at Birkbeck, University of London reintroduced invigilated exams this academic year after academics grew concerned about essays their students had not written. The University of Bath is retiring its traffic-light AI categories for a two-lane model from 2026-27: every assessment is either open, where using AI is expected or permitted, or closed, where it is not. Across the sector, coursework is quietly giving ground to oral exams, in-class writing, handwritten scripts, and assessments that mark how you got there rather than what you handed in.

Read those together and the pattern is clear. The bar is moving from “can you produce this” to “can you produce this, here, without help.”

Why they are doing it

Not because AI is bad at the work. Because of what leaning on it appears to do to the person leaning.

Researchers at Oregon State University published a study this year, “Thinking Less, Trusting More”, looking at how generative AI use tracks with students’ cognitive habits. They reported that each additional unit of AI use came with a 66% fall in reflection, a 41% fall in critical thinking, and a 21% fall in the felt need to understand why something works. The students most prone to it were the ones with exactly the traits STEM fields prize.

That is one correlational study of one cohort, and it deserves reading rather than reposting. But it matches what teachers keep describing independently: fluent work, thin understanding. The phrase that has stuck is cognitive debt. You borrow the thinking now, and you repay it later, usually in a room with no wifi.

The distinction that actually matters

There are two jobs you can give an AI, and they look almost identical from the outside.

Job one: produce the answer. Paste the essay question, take the output, tidy it, submit. Fast, and in a closed-lane assessment, now both against the rules and useless practice for the thing you will be asked to do unassisted.

Job two: make you able to produce the answer. Find the passage you half remember. Show you the source so you check it yourself. Ask you questions from your own material until you can answer them cold. Slower on Tuesday, decisive in May.

Almost every “AI study tool” list you will read this August ranks tools on job one, because job one is easy to demo. Job two is the one that survives an invigilator.

What job two looks like in practice

This is the assumption Normi is built on, so treat the following as a description of a bet rather than a neutral survey.

Answers come with the receipt. Ask what your week 3 reading said about attachment styles and you get the answer plus a pin to the exact PDF it came from. One tap to check. The AI did the finding; you keep the judgement. That is the division of labour that keeps understanding on your side of the table, and it is why we show the source every single time.

Quizzes come from your material, not the internet’s version of it. Retrieval practice is the least fashionable and best evidenced study technique there is, and its weakness has always been that making the questions is tedious. Normi generates them from the readings and lecture slides you actually uploaded, so every question traces back to something you are genuinely being examined on.

One place, so recall is cheap. Syllabus, readings, lecture slides, a photo of the whiteboard, your handwritten notes. When finding something takes one question instead of ten minutes, you spend the recovered time on the part that has to happen in your head.

A goal, a streak, and today’s move. Closed-book assessment rewards spaced work over heroic weekends. The daily brief exists to make the small consistent version of studying the easy one.

Where a chatbot is still the better tool

Credibility matters more to us than a clean sweep, so: if you want a concept explained from scratch, several analogies for something that has not clicked, a draft to react to, or help with code, a general chatbot is excellent and Normi is not trying to replace it. Bath’s open lane exists for a reason, and in it you are expected to use these tools well rather than avoid them. Learning to do that is now part of the degree.

The difference is scope. A chatbot knows the internet’s version of your course. Your marker is examining you on your lecturer’s version. Only one of those has your seminar notes in it.

If you are starting a course this autumn

A-level results land on Thursday 13 August and GCSE results on Thursday 20 August, and then a lot of people have about three weeks before a term that will be assessed under noticeably tighter rules than the last one.

The setup worth doing in those three weeks is small: put your material in one place, ask questions of it rather than of the internet, check the sources it gives you, and let it quiz you until you can answer without it. That is the whole method. It is not new, it is just newly enforced.

We think that is the right direction, and not only because it suits us. Our back-to-school post makes the case that you do not need a stack of five AI tools. This is the sharper version of the same argument: you need one that is trying to make you better rather than trying to make you unnecessary.

Normi is not here to replace you. It is here to make you better, which as of this autumn is also the only version that passes.

Normi is on iOS and Android with a 3-day free trial of the full app.

The practice-paper format built for exactly this — written long-form, graded after submission — lives on turning your notes into a quiz.