Why are students taking handwritten notes? Typing is much more efficient

During my physics undergraduate, it was for two primary reasons

1) Writing is more efficient when taking notes in real-time for maths notation

2) Better rentention of knowledge from the act of writing vs typing

Now as I teach, more students use tablets to take notes. But they're still writing, not typing

I disagree and am not sure what you mean by "efficient". I have never liked typing notes, be it in school or at work. Handwriting flows much better for me and I also find reading through notes, or just finding them, on paper easier.

I still usually show up at meetings with only a notebook and a pen... (added bonus: no-one asks me to connect to Teams/whatnot because they have a problem)

Many claim that writing notes by hand helps in retention of the material.

- Fewer distractions from other things on the computer

- digital becomes harder if you want to sketch things or write formulas (some friends in uni could type LaTeX as as fast as the lecturer could write on the blackboard, I certainly couldn't)

Efficient for what, though? It's certainly faster for rote recording of information, but I learn complex information in less time when I hand-write it out. Also, you have to be really well-practiced in LaTeX math packages to type arbitrary math well. Hand-writing math is much more straightforward with limited learning time.

I write notes when I want to retain the information in my head.

I type notes into my "second brain"[1] when I want to be able to later refer to that information but not retain it in my head.

1. Currently, a Markdown file in Obsidian.

It depends on the topic. Math notation is a 2D horrible domain specific mess, and it's much faster to draw it in 2D than forcing it into a 1D symbol chain. (Bonus point for Greek letters or $\weird$ symbols.)

When studying CS questions for software engineering interviews, I found being able to sketch and freehand draw helped me understand concepts such as memory, cpu architecture and recursion better

Absolutely not more efficient when dealing with Mathematics or math-heavy notation which is 90% of my notes. Maybe an iPad might help but it's out of my budget right now.

Why at all? If you want to record the lecture, use photo, video, audio recording.

Citation needed.