[pgalvin]

University exams being marked by hand, by someone experienced enough to work outside a rigid marking scheme, has been the standard for hundreds of years and has proven scalable enough. If there are so many students that academics can’t keep up, there are likely too many students to maintain a high standard of education anyway.

[unbrice]

> there are likely too many students to maintain a high standard of education anyway.

Right on point. I find particularly striking how little is said about whether the best students achieve the best grades. Authors are even candid that different LLMs asses differently, but seem to conclude that LLMs converging after a few rounds of cross reviews indicate they are plausible so who cares. The apparences are safe.

[haberman]

The rate of college attendance has increased dramatically in the last 250 years, and especially in the last 75.

In 1789 there were 1,000 enrolled college students total, in a country of 2.8M. In 2025, it is 19M students in a country of 340M. https://educationalpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/251...

In 1950, 5.5% of adults ages 25-34 had completed a 4 year college degree. In 2018, it was 39%. https://www.highereddatastories.com/2019/08/changes-in-educa...

With attendance increasing at this rate (not to mention the exploding costs of tuition), it seems possible that the methods need to change as well.

[ninalanyon]

So now we have a lot more people who can teach and mark exams.

[aaplok]

A limitation of written exams is in distance education, which simply was hardly a thing for the hundreds of years exams were used. Just like WFH is a new practice employers have to learn to deal with, study from home (SFH) is a phenomenon that is going to affect education.

The objections to SFH exist and are strikingly similar to objections to WFH, but the economics are different. Some universities already see value in offering that option, and they (of course) leave it to the faculty to deal with the consequences.

[sarchertech]

Distance education is a tiny percentage of higher education though. Online classes at a local university are more common, but you can still bring the students in for proctored exams.

Even for distance education though, proctored testing centers have been around longer than the internet.

[aaplok]

> Distance education is a tiny percentage of higher education though.

It is about a third of the students I teach, which amounts to several hundreds per term. It may be niche, but it is not insignificant, and definitely a problem for some of us.

> Even for distance education though, proctored testing centers have been around longer than the internet.

I don't know how much experience you have with those. Mine is extensive enough that I have a personal opinion that they are not scalable (which is the focus of the comment I was replying to). If you have hundreds of students disseminated around the world, organising a proctored exam is a logistical challenge.

It is not a problem at many universities yet, because they haven't jumped on the bandwagon. However domestic markets are becoming saturated, visas are harder to get for international students, and there is a demand for online education. I would be surprised that it doesn't develop more in the near future.

[sarchertech]

I agree that proctoring across hundreds of locations globally could be a challenge.

I think the end result though is that schools either limit their students to a smaller number of locations where they can have proctored exams, or they don’t and they effectively lose their credentialing value.