My children are taking their first big exams – and revealing my own fears about AI and long division | Emma Brockes

CHow would you feel if you did long division? I had no illusions. I didn’t make it the first time, and four decades later it seemed unlikely that the situation had improved. (For a split second I thought AI might help, but it was like listening to street directions, only worse.) And while parents of 11-year-olds offer compassion and support to their children ahead of sixth-graders’ exams next week, let’s not lose sight of the real victims here, namely us parents who were forced to grapple with multi-level math problems again after we made big and conscious life decisions to avoid them.

Of course, exams “don’t matter,” or if you’re a more liberal parent, exams don’t matter overall — a statement that, once a comforting lie, seems to be becoming more and more true. The value of testing has always been debated, but as AI displaces entry-level jobs, university degrees are becoming increasingly expensive and…