Hear, hear!
Doing programming on paper seems to me like assessing someone's skills in acrobatics by watching them do the motions in a zero-gravity environment. Without the affordances given by the computer, it's just not the same activity.
Computer science, the academic discipline, is to programming as mechanics is to bowling.
You can very easily test CS concepts on paper, and programming is demonstrated via group projects.
Absolutely. It makes good sense to describe algorithms on paper via pseudo-code and diagrams, but they shouldn't be expected to write working code on paper.
I kinda had this sentiment until I actually started working - quite often an issue only manifests at an obscure customer system or is a race condition that it too rare to catch reliably, yet happens often enough so you can't just ignore it.
To solve those in a reasonable amount of time, you need to form a mental model of what is going on & how to fix it. Having access to a computer by itself won't really help for those.
In that context paper exams for computer science make much more sense to me now - they want you to understand the problem and provide a solution, with pen and paper being the output format.