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The world-renowned Cambridge University is abolishing handwritten exams after 800 years. University officials may students to their exam answers on a computer rather than a pen. The move complaints from examination markers who they are finding test papers increasingly illegible due to poor handwriting. Academics say today's students primarily use laptops in lectures and tutorials instead of pens. Students are the ability to by hand. One academic said asking students to hand-write exams actually them physical difficulties. The muscles in their hand not used to writing extensively for prolonged periods of two to three hours.

A Cambridge University lecturer, Dr Sarah Pearsall, Britain's 'Daily Telegraph' newspaper that handwriting was a "lost art". She said: "Twenty years ago, students routinely [] by hand several hours a day, but now they virtually nothing by hand, except exams." She : "We have been for years about the declining handwriting problem. There has definitely a downward trend. It is difficult for both the students and the examiners as it is harder and harder to these [exam] scripts." Dr Pearsall says some students' handwriting is so illegible that they had to to the university over the summer to read their answers out loud to examiners who could not their writing.