As it always should have been. Even Plato/Socrates were intelligent enough to muse about the idea that writing has degraded our memory vs when we had to memorize entire epic poems. They had a lot of hostile stuff to say about writing in Timaeus and other works.

The fact that most teachers refuse to do in-person oral exams has always been due to laziness, incompetence, and the reality of the economics of dealing with classroom sizes where 30 is considered small.