[walrus01]

> In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written.

Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and libreoffice writer as a basic word processor.

Let people at least type their essay with the standard features of a word processor as usable as MS Word 2000 or better.

[QuadmasterXLII]

I’m 30 and “we can’t do tests in paper” seems _insane_. Just how metastatic has ed tech been in what, 9 years since my undergrad?

[walrus01]

I'm quite a bit older than you, old enough that I remember learning to touch type in elementary school on Apple IIe and IIgs desktop computers. It's not reasonable these days to expect people to hand write a 4, 6, 8 page length essay on paper and pen with a finite time limit in a classroom. Being able to edit and revise things in a word processor type interface is an essential part of writing an academic paper.

Additionally expecting whoever is reading the paper to comprehend everyone's (likely very sloppy, in this era) handwriting is an exercise in frustration for the person who would be evaluating the papers.

Not that tests/exams can't be given on paper, ever (multiple choice still works), but for something where people are expected to provide multiple pages of coherently written essay output, I would struggle to do it by hand. And I'm old enough that we did do a lot purely on paper when I was in school.

[__d]

My child's high school is doing the same thing: all exams are now handwritten on paper in a supervised room. Phones and smartwatches are always banned during the school day, but laptops are banned during exams. This is standard at state-funded high schools in Australia.

There will likely be a period where those who went through high school with computers struggle with hand writing stuff, but the next generation will have done it all their lives.

[rtpg]

I had to do "write code on paper" stuff as part of french engineering school entrance exams.

It's fine (tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"), but it limits what kinds of problems you can reasonably put on the exam. You'll definitely lean a bit more into theoretical stuff than practicals. Which is fine for some courses, I think a bit less interesting in other courses.

Remember, the hand written code is also harder for reviewers to grade! You have to manually run the code in your head, for example

Having said all that... "we've booked the computer room, you don't have internet, go type up all your stuff in this VM we have set up" feels fine if you don't like this constraint IMO

[ant6n]

I’m 40 and forcing students to do handwritten essays during tests has always been stupid. Typing is much faster, why bottleneck ideas by forcing handwriting?

[ThrowawayR2]

A lecture hall full of click-click-click isn't going to be conducive to concentrating on a test.

[rsanek]

If you can't concentrate while people are working on computers near you, I don't think you'll do well in any workplace that is based around knowledge work.

[kalium-xyz]

I had tons of exams like that. Its not an issue as the computers simply do not have loud mechanical keyboards connected

[yulker]

because writing speed isn't the bottleneck for what is being tested

[dzink]

Fill the room with typewriters.

[walrus01]

Typewriters are an expensive and niche item these days, due to no longer being manufactured, and the good ones being collected by weird nerds. Sort of like buying a 40-year-old vinyl turntable that is in good and usable condition.

[dzink]

If I build you a custom device that receives questions from a central computer and lets the user plug in whatever keyboard they want via bluetooth or usb to only type and answer the questions (ability to edit the text and submit when ready). The central computer can receive all the questions submitted to any of these devices connected to it via wifi or cloud. How much would pay per device? Would you pay for a subscription?

[walrus01]

I think this can already be implemented through a fairly mundane thin client approach, such as Dell/Wyse type thin clients, citrix stuff, or an ordinary x86-64 desktop PC setup with an absolute barebones OS that connects a graphical desktop session to something centralized over a LAN.

[kalium-xyz]

You cant type fast on them either

[forgetfreeman]

I'm 50. Optimizing testing for speed is goofy. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the student's understanding of the material, not their WPM.

[tengwar2]

I'm 60+. I'd be more concerned about the student's physical ability to write for several hours continuously. Writer's cramp used to be a problem, and that was when we were used to hand-writing everything. Legibility is also a consideration: I have to hand-write a lot(keyboards would not be socially acceptable for some of my work), and even with decades of practice and a hand that I designed for legibility, sometimes I have difficulty reading my own writing.

[dminik]

You should definitely take speed into consideration. If your're writing an essay, being able to type it out and still have both the opportunity and time to edit it is great. If you're writing it on paper, you likely have neither. What comes to you first is what's submitted.

[doodlesdev]

And that's exactly the point! By making sure the student can't edit the entire text once its written, you force him to think about the essay's structure and force him to plan much more before writing :)

[imron]

If you’re suggesting that the test favors those capable of arranging their thoughts and words before putting pen to paper then.... I’m not sure there’s a problem

[forgetfreeman]

And yet strangely this hasn't proved a major impediment to the species at any point in the last ~5000 years...

[xp84]

Sure but given any length of time, which does tend to be finitely allocated for a test (if for no other reason than the prof or proctor does have other places to be eventually), having to hand write is slower and harder to revise, which means it's harder to get that full, understanding-demonstrating essay, done and polished.

[dwattttt]

If your test is bottlenecked on the speed it takes to write it, you're testing writing skills.

I also challenge that "hand writing is harder to revise"; again, why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?

[xp84]

> challenge "hand writing is harder to revise"

What? Suppose you want to fix the opening of your essay. Best case it's pencil and you can erase some, but worst case you have a longer sentence you want to put in there so you can't do it without scribbling all over and making a mess of the page. Word processors let you edit. How is this controversial?

> why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?

Okay, so from first principles:

1. Time is finite, we will all perish

2. Unless you are doing open book, needs to be supervised (proctored / or prof/TA is there)

3. That person is paid for a shift

4. That shift must end

5. Therefore, anything that enables people to write faster is good for the students, who can get more paper written, or the paper better revised, during the finite time available for writing.

[customguy]

> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary.

I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now I'm even more radical.

It's like PE or brushing your teeth. Nobody initially wants it, so we, knowing better, force them.

[vector_spaces]

I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class.

That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here

[WalterBright]

How can you tell if they learned anything if you don't test them?

[zdragnar]

I'm neither fully left handed or fully right handed. I mostly write with my left hand, but it has never been clean, despite doing all of my school work for 18 years with either pencil or pen and paper.

I wish I could have a just spent "an afternoon" to magically make either my printing or cursive better, but it basically stalled out early on and never improved despite years of practice.

[subygan]

i don't at all think it's that obvious / easy.

i was taught cursive in 2nd grade. and my handwriting is gobsmackingly horrible. coming back to stuff I've written after I've forgotten the context, makes it impossible for me to understand what I've written.

and it's not for lack of trying. I spent almost every summer till 10th grade, practicing writing 30 pages a day. and still it gets reset to my horrible hand writing in weeks after school start. at this point, i just consider myself hand writing challenged.

i cannot tell you how much happy i am that, computers have made handwritten exams obsolete.

[techjamie]

I was in the same boat as a kid. My handwriting is so bad, for the essay portion of the state test we had to take one year, they got an exemption and let me use Notepad to type mine out because they didn't want to risk my grade if the person couldn't read my writing. This was in the mid-2000s.

These days I just disclaim to people when I hand them anything handwritten that I'm very aware my writing is terrible, and I will not be offended at all if they have to ask what it says.

[encomiast]

> I think everybody should be able to write cursive

As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?

[WalterBright]

Doing work with handwriting helps in learning the material. I don't know why that works, but my experience (and others') clearly shows it does.

[remashedspood]

And I strongly disagree.

The moment I have to write stuff down my focus is gone and I might as well be taking a nap.

And having to read my own handwriting assures I’ll never look at that page, again.

Different strokes

[DangitBobby]

Having to write stuff down made it impossible for me to pay attention to the lecture. But I was definitely more likely to remember what I did write down. Bit of a catch 22

[Larrikin]

Do you acknowledge you're a minority?

I detest writing and have terrible handwriting but have seen first hand that typing or just listening is not as effective. In grad school I sucked it up and just typed up my handwritten notes so they were searchable when I actually needed them to be.

But writing by hand and just reading them over was usually enough.

[encomiast]

That's been my experience as well. I'm just curious about cursive writing specifically.

[WalterBright]

point taken. I learned to take notes by printing by hand, as my cursive was illegible.

[shagie]

It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them.

... And there are jobs that use those skills.

Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/

My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.

[encomiast]

If anyone is interested, here is a link where you can download the study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221770027_Correlati...

I few interesting bits — it does involve cursive, but it's Arabic and it's graded on a rubric that includes things like "Presenting the beauty aspects of Arabic writing'. Also, given a sample of 71 students and a p<0.001 means the correlation coefficient only needs to be around 0.40 which means handwriting and drawing may only explain about 16% of the variance of these dental skills. That's not nothing, but given the subjective nature of the test and the confounders (does this handwriting sample really measure motor skills or maybe it measures care and attention to detail, or conscientiousness), I'd be a little wary of using this to argue for education policy.

Still, glad you posted it and glad I read it. It interesting.

[robcohen]

So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?

[metalcrow]

What's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?

[cataphract]

What is "standard writing"? Isn't cursive the standard you're taught and then everyone writes however they want?

[Larrikin]

In 2nd grade I was assured by my teachers that all adults wrote cursive and you had to relearn the alphabet again. Then in 3rd grade the teachers all said they couldn't read anyone's handwriting and to print everything.

In high school the most difficult part of the SAT was the honor pledge that you didn't cheat that you had to write in cursive. Nobody writes cursive.

[Arainach]

No. Most people handwrite most things in print lettering, not cursive. I'm nearly 40 and no one in my life writes anything other than their name (signature) in cursive ever.

[encomiast]

When I was in school we started with "manuscript" writing, which is detached letters similar to a typical sans-serif typeface without the two-story `a` and other fanciness. We then progressed to cursive.

[wombatpm]

Physics 107 at U of I in the 80’s had all quizzes on the PLATO system. Please for the love of mercy do not not go back to inflexible systems for exams and quizzes.

[freehorse]

Talking about programming-related courses, I can see the point of testing on a computer where one can run and debug actual code (that's how I had my programming courses) but I am not sure I get the advantage or writing code or pseudocode on a "basic word processor".

Moreover, for math or math-heavy courses (assuming most people with degrees here have STEM degrees, and many with at least some math) I cannot imagine how to comfortably write math in a word processor. Or use latex and not spend half the time troubleshooting latex, esp without internet access. So for some kind of courses at least, imo pen and paper for a timed in-person exam is the only way.

Otherwise def doable, but knowing how some universities function, I think the main problem would be getting the agreement and initiative to set such a computer room up. Getting some kind of consensus between professors that this is how (some) exams should be held and including it in the Holy Curriculum. Getting bureaucrats understand what it is about eg why you need these wired connections when the uni has a campus-wide wifi. Getting IT security agree with using old computers with lubuntu instead of their bloated enterprise windows "secure" OS. And if they are not connected to the internet how will they get security updates? How do we conform to whatever IT security rules are in place?

Writing on paper is much simpler, everybody can understand it and has been standard for decades at least. It can start tomorrow and be used in the interim while waiting approval for such a computer setup.

[fn-mote]

Writing on paper requires higher level planning skills.

A word processor allows you to edit, which is a major part of the writing process.

Forcing learners to plan everything “perfectly” before they write is a big ask. And you’re probably not teaching that skill.

I remember how much my technical writing skills improved once I started writing in a computer and editing. It was a huge difference.

[recursivedoubts]

More expensive than you'd think, but I am pushing for something like that.

[tialaramex]

It would also be a huge discrimination problem.

I (as part of a small team) run the IT side of exams for a UK University and as well as the many exams intended to be taken entirely with computers, we also deliberately have an exam that's always marked as "Available to take" regardless of where on campus you are and what machine you're using, that exam just launches a stripped down Microsoft Word, with no way to start other software or access your own data.

So instead of reading the instruction book and writing either in the book or on separate provided paper, you read the book and type your answers in Word, when you're done either your work is printed or these days often it's automatically sent to the markers electronically.

There's a spectrum of people using this, going from the profoundly blind who couldn't have attempted an actual hand written exam through to people who have dyslexia or similar problems and would be able to write but it might be very difficult to mark. It also becomes a "last ditch fallback" for a number of scenarios where plans went wrong or something was forgotten and so that's why it's always available - we do run exams specifically planned to be in Word, but those have distinct IDs so that you know you're taking the exam "HIST1234/C4 History of Clowns and Clowning. Essay on prepared topic" or whatever, as well as "Multiple choice" style exams, and a large number of exams which involve using computer tooling, e.g. R, Stats packages, programming.

[Bawoosette]

When I started university, it did indeed have a dedicated building that was essentially a computer lab specifically for testing. In theory, cheating was prevented by having people walk around the lab watching the students. Toward the end, I did have a couple exams that needed the absolutely batshit insane malware installed on a personal device, but I think if I were to do it again today, I could still demand to use the testing center instead. It still exists.

[tiahura]

What's wrong with https://www.scantron.com/?

[Arainach]

For nearly any subject of learning at a level above high school, multiple choice is a terrible way to assess knowledge.

Multiple choice can only tell if you reached a final answer (or guessed it). It cannot tell anything about how you reached that conclusion.

[userbinator]

However, it is a fast and simple method of assessment.

[dekdrop]

how do you make sure they are not using their mobile phone with llms while the exam? I have seen that happening.

[walrus01]

The same method that any test given in the last 150 years has done to prevent people from using cheat sheets or similar, by having roaming proctors in the room? Or policies like certain models of HP or TI graphing calculator only allowed on the table, for the sort of test that requires one...

[WalterBright]

Somehow I got through high school and 4 years of every class being a math class in college without a graphing calculator.

[pianopatrick]

If people wanted to get really serious you could use a cell phone jammer and have students pass through a mini EMP at the door.

[jasondigitized]

Seems like a problem an entrepreneur / technologist can easily solve.

[wnevets]

Can you fit a decent LLM on a thumbdrive?

[walrus01]

Lots of ways to disable USB ports in bios and at the operating system level, additionally have a proctor watching to be sure everyone is in a word processor. Heck, ewaste grade computers can run a basic word processor, fill all USB ports except the mouse and keyboard with epoxy. Mount the computer in such a way the rear ports are inaccessible without it being very obvious what someone is doing and fill just the front ports (if they exist) with epoxy. Lots of ways to go about it.

[bryanlarsen]

A proctored exam doesn't need to have perfect lock-down. The proctor should notice the thumb-drive. They might miss it, but the risk will deter most.

[bagels]

It can fit on augmented reality glasses, eventually.

[walrus01]

Pretty sure that augmented reality glasses, and things in the category of the meta glasses with built-in camera are already banned in most academic test environments, by a blanket policy prohibiting the use of any camera in the room.

[bagels]

Right, they're easy to detect today, that's not going to last long. The whole point is to prevent cheating, well, cheats aren't going to follow the rules. Written tests/in person tests aren't a complete answer to this.

[sarchertech]

If augmented reality glasses advance to the point where you can’t easily tell from a distance, then make the students hand them over for a close inspection.

If we get to the point where even that doesn’t work then we’ll be at the point where a camera in the room with an AI analyzing eye movements should be able to detect it. And no matter how advanced they get they’ll still need to radiate heat, so a thermal camera should work. If that fails, industrial CT scanners are getting cheaper and cheaper.

Heck if it gets too bad there’s always mm wave body scanners and a set of cheap glasses kept at school.

[walrus01]

About 95% joking, but in that case, have everyone lock their phones in a tiny locker shelf thing and wand everyone with a nonlinear junction detector. If we get to the point in technology and battery capability where camera glasses are compact enough to be indistinguishable from ordinary metal eyeglass frames, we'll probably also have really good low cost portable tech to detect any on-body electronics (vs the flesh and clothing and metal accessories like belt buckles on a human body).

[Avicebron]

Probably safer to use typewriters.

[paul7986]

There should be no computer at all just give students a typewriter. It could prompt a resurgence of the typewriter :)

[loloquwowndueo]

These days pretty sure computers are cheaper than typewriters.

[shagie]

You can get a manual typewriter (hammer rather than ball) on Amazon for about $200. Brand name ones run in the $300 - $400 range.

A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons - https://apnews.com/article/typewriter-ai-cheating-chatgpt-co...

[walrus01]

Computers good enough to run libreoffice writer or the equivalent and print to a networked laser are thrown in the ewaste trash all the time, the cost really would be in the labor and somewhat custom software setup. Could also reuse old flat panel displays that have been decommissioned from office use.

[loloquwowndueo]

Lubing typewriters and ensuring they have a fresh ribbon also sounds pretty labor intensive.

(Where do you even get ribbons these days)

[BaculumMeumEst]

Nobody is going to do that.

[walrus01]

Why not?

[sokoloff]

Do you let students bring their own keyboards? If not, does that disadvantage a Dvorak user? Or a Kinesis user? Or a non-US layout? Or a Mac user?

If you do let them bring their own keyboards, how sure are you that those are just dumb keyboards?

[walrus01]

I would bet good money, statistically, that forcing hand written tests with pen and paper is much more likely to disadvantage students with a medically documented physical disability than you are to encounter someone who can't type at all on a standard 101 key qwerty layout keyboard.

[vcf]

At my university, students with verified disabilities are allowed to use a university-provided laptop (properly locked-down, with allowed tools such as screen readers). But these are special cases. Computers for everyone would be costly and impractical given exams are punctual but all roughly over the same week or so.