I graduated in 2018 from a university where writing exams by hand was standard practice. We weren't punished if syntax wasn't correct character-by-character, only if the ideas we were attempting to convey in the message were fundamentally incorrect.

I have incredibly terrible handwriting and recall of specific syntax was difficult, but I wasn't punished terribly for either of those faults.

Already in 2018, almost everyone was cheating on typed assignments, "helping" each other with homeworks, and a significant portion of kids were abusing stimulants to get by. Exams were typically 70-80% of your grade. Now, when I speak with current students at that university and as I observed first-hand in 2020, when they went remote and generally relaxed standards and processes, how the quality of the instruction and the quality of the resulting "educated" students has fallen off the face of a cliff.

I'd be furious if I were paying tens of thousands of dollars to receive a university-level education in software engineering in 2025 and I had no educator willing to put their foot down and stop myself and my peers from faking the fact that we know anything indicating that we deserve the degree. What's a degree worth when nobody is willing to do the work required and lay down the tough love necessary to actually educate you?

No, you don't write code by hand. Maybe pseudo-code, analize some given code or you have to specify the general architecture for a system. But in other courses, for example operating systems, networks, distributed systems you have to answer questions like "when udp is the right choice over tcp?", "what kind of problems are associated with pagination?", "what are vector clocks?", etc., using pen and paper.

The professor is not actually compiling your code, the idea is to know whether you can pseudo code a solution, of course.