Some tests require symbols (like greek letters), which aren’t easy to type by default. Also, people have been practicing all year by handwriting responses (since we didn’t know it would be online, obviously) - so a handwritten option is accommodating that.
Some of the exams (like biology) no longer require calculations this year--instead of doing the calculation, you just explain how you would do it. This has been confusing for a lot of students, but it solves the "special input methods" problem.
This brings back horrible memories of the janky-ass software we used in calculus for our exams. It took probably 10x longer to answer a question with the GUI because of the symbols and half the time they'd be marked wrong because the system couldn't handle equivalent variations of the correct answer.
I doubt things are much better today. This was probably the "low-tech" solution to a decade+ of dealing with the above problem.
