[jbullock35]

> In general, being good at academics require you to think carefully not quickly.

Yes, but to go even further: timed tests often test, in part, your ability to handwrite quickly rather than slowly. There is great variation in handwriting speed — I saw it as a student and as a professor — and in classrooms, we should no more be testing students for handwriting speed than we should be testing them on athletic ability.

In general, timed tests that involve a lot of handwriting are appalling. We use them because they make classroom management easier, not because they are justifiable pedagogy.

[AlexandrB]

This is true about other things like reading speed as well. It still doesn't mean that time limits are useless. These are skills you can develop up to a reasonable level through practice if they're lacking, not something fixed like height. And if it takes you 12 hours to get through a 2 hour test because of these factors it's a sign that you're not going to be a very effective employee/researcher. Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.

[jbullock35]

> Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.

Yes, I agree. But my point is about handwriting, rather than writing in general. Handwriting speed is something that we are effectively testing with many in-class exams. And handwriting speed - unlike reading or writing speed - is indeed unrelated to job performance. It is also unrelated to any reasonable measure of academic performance.

[neltnerb]

It is an interesting point about handwriting as distinct from reading or writing alone. I appreciate it, thank you.

I would not concede that speed is not as important as doing it correctly in the context of evaluating learning. There are homework, projects, and papers where there is a lot of time available to probe whether they can think it through and do it correctly with no time limit. It's ideal if everyone can finish an exam, but there needs to be some kind of pressure for people to learn to quickly identify a kind of problem, identify the correct solution approach, and actually carry out the solution.

But they shouldn't be getting penalized for not doing a page of handwritten linear algebra correctly, I totally agree that you need to make sure you're testing what you think you're testing.

[HDThoreaun]

I can not think of a single test I have ever taken where I could be limited by handwriting speed. Most of the time on tests is spent thinking, not writing.

[jbullock35]

When I was a student in the United States in the 1990s, I took many tests in which handwriting speed limited me. It was purely a physical problem. When I was permitted to type, there was no issue. To be clear, I'm speaking of tests in the humanities and social sciences, for which students must write short essays.

Later, when I was a professor in the United States, I saw some of my students grappling with the same problem.

I don't think that my students and I are extraordinary. Other people were, and are, limited by slow handwriting when they are required to handwrite their exams. You could try to identify these people and give them extra time. But the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint.

[fn-mote]

> the better move would be to stop requiring students to handwrite essays under a time constraint

Alas, we now depend on "lockdown browser mode" for reliably taking tests where you can type, and still there's no support (AFAIK) for "lockdown vim in browser" for coding tests.

[godelski]

I remember a Linear II test where we had to do Gram-Schmidt on a few large matrices and the prof was a stickler for showing steps. I'm not sure if writing was the limiting factor but it was definitely a major factor. Quantum mechanics is also one of those where there can be a lot of intermediate steps if you don't have things like group theory under your belt (and you usually don't if you're in Griffiths).

I think I'd be careful about generalizing your experience, nor mine. If my time in academia has taught me anything is that there is pretty high variance. Not just between schools, but even in a single department. I'm sure everyone that's gone to uni at one point made a decision between "hard professor that I'll learn a lot from but get a bad grade" vs "easier professor which I'll get a good grade." The unicorn where you get both is just more rare. Let's be honest, most people will choose the latter, since the reality is that your grade probably matters more than the actual knowledge. IMO this is a failure of the system. Clear example of Goodhart's Law. But I also don't have a solution to present as measuring knowledge is simply just a difficult task. I'm sure you've all met people who are very smart and didn't do well in school as well as the inverse. The metric used to be "good enough" for "most people" but things have gotten so competitive that optimizing the metric is all that people can see.

[QuadmasterXLII]

I had an abstract algebra exam where for the last question, I couldn’t remember the theorem to do it in a sensible way, but could see that the brute force approach only needed ~40 modular multiplications. That came down to the wire!

Shockingly I got full credit, although the professor probably picked a bigger prime for her next class.

[bawolff]

I had a test once where we had to do RSA by hand (with 4 digit numbers), no calculators allowed. There was a lot of handwriting on scrap pieces of paper.

Do humanities have to do handwritten essay tests in the modern world. I had to do those in middle school/high school. No idea if that is still a thing.

[WalterBright]

> scrap pieces of paper

The exams I took were done in blue books where you were required to show your work.

[peterfirefly]

You didn't have both? Scrap for trying out ideas, double-checking, making mistakes and then "blue books" for the stuff you hand in (with the answers + all the steps you choose to show).

[WalterBright]

No need. I just X'd out failed approaches. There were always plenty of pages in the blue book.

[ykonstant]

Lucky you.