It was just expected that you had a grasp of the literature enough that you could argue off-the-cuff in the exam setting, and then you were given leeway if you didn't have exact Harvard style notations to exact date/titles of referenced material.
Student turn-in a mid-term paper. A professor chooses a certain number of points from the mid-term paper and asks for explanations of these in long-hand. Pulling questions this way doesn't seem like it would take more time than a thorough reading of the text.
Oh, but paper reading has been delegated to a drudge you wouldn't trust with pulling question, oh how inconvenient. Which is to say the problems AI introduces to education are strongly related to much of work already being made mindless before AI appeared.
Doctoral candidates do this kind of thing all the time in qualifying exams, but that's after years of graduate school and fresh off doing nothing but reading 100+ books over the course of a few months.
No, High school students can do this. Well, they get impelled to do this. They can't do this now but that's a testament to current education.
The next thing that happens is a befuddled "Ask HN: Why Do All The Daisy Wheel Printers On Ebay Suddenly Cost Thousands Of Dollars?".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing
You can sometimes locally win an arms race by doing something really exotic that isn't worth the work to defeat, but this is definitely not a strategy that works if everyone adopts it.