Initial cost is almost certainly not a factor; the components could be so old as to be free.

Playing devil's advocate: one reason I'm good at typing on computers is that I learned on typewriters, which need much more force for each key press, especially the little fingers. Someone who learned on computer keyboards won't have trained the muscles on their fingers as much, and will have a hard time pressing the outer keys strongly enough (and if you press the keys too lightly, the mechanism won't hit the ink ribbon with enough force to transfer the ink to the paper).

But this is missing the point. The issue is not that people in general can't write by hand for hours, but that these particular people may have difficulty.

Define “worked” there are reasons we have abandoned quite a few archaic practices which turned to be highly ineffective in hindsight (and often quite misery inducing). I’m not implying that handwriting is one of them just that it’s a terrible argument.

> burden of proof is on the side saying that kids

Smacking children who fail to give a correct answer with a stick worker for thousands of years as well..

Most curricula should probably feature both forms of assessment, demonstrating your knowledge of the basics in a closed book assessment and your ability to produce high quality final products using all resources available to you in take home assignments.

You're thinking of the output as the goal rather than as the means to an end.

Honestly, school essays, as a text genre, suck to read. They are not meant to be enjoyable, beautiful texts! Instead, they are meant to help gauge the student's ability at text planning, the quality of their text project, their grammatical knowledge, and orthography.

I must say I'd be open to seeing schools attempting other models, though, and measuring the results thereafter to see in practice what happens when students type their essays instead. In terms of text projects and planning, that could be interesting and train different skills.

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

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.

But then I'd use that to write the actual text answer, and consequently, it was mostly clean. I'd still have to cross stuff out or add a phrase between the lines every so often, but once the basic structure was done, that was mostly unnecessary.

And if I was ever pressed for time, I'd usually get part marks for the outline anyway. Depending on the subject, I'd sometimes race through the questions doing just the outlines, and then come back to write the full text as a complete second pass.

To be fair, this wasn't creative writing. I think it'd be harder when the expression is the content.

You don’t write the test to fill the 60 minute slot. You time it so students are able to finish early if they’re really good. Slow ones need the whole time but can still do well if they understand the material being tested.

- someone with a good understanding will often come to a concise, clear answer while someone struggling will produce a convoluted paragraph.

- the way to get to the result will vary depending on your understanding (e.g., are you blindly applying some method or understanding what's going on). For instance, "hey, this is a vector field, I don't need to evaluate this complex integral, I just need to compute the difference between the start and endpoint of the curve!". Both answers will be correct, but one denotes a much better actual understanding (and will take way less time).

I think you're missing some logic in there somewhere. If a student fills in as many pages as they can, each with the number 1 written on it as large as possible, was this a good conclusion? The quantity of writing is not a good metric.

EDIT: to give a closer to reality example, an essay that's 4 times longer than a competing essay does not make it better.

That's a strawman. I said bottlenecking testing by requiring hand writing is stupid. Put another way - you're meant to be using the test to be thinking and re-thinking the problem and articulating approaches and solutions, not use your time, effort and energy on managing quill and paper.

Testing for understanding requires the fastest WPM possible. Regardless of the method used, students don't all write at the same speed. To minimize the influence of this variance, they need to use the fastest writing technique possible. If a fast writer spends 30 minutes writing in a two hour test, and a slow writer needs a full hour, the fast writer gets 50% more thinking time. But if you double both their writing speeds, the fast writer's advantage drops to 17%.

The faster the writing technique people are allowed to use, the better your test can identify poor understanding.

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

How practical is this?

1. Is your institution able to provide this support?

2. Do you believe you are able to supervise the room well enough that students will be caught if they cheat? (Eg, bring a phone and look up answers.)

I don’t know about 1s practicality. In my schooling it would always be doable but I have the impression US schools are a different scale

If you can escape the vm on the fly and manage to use an llm to cheat, you deserve that A.

This is basically how ICPC works (https://icpc.global/)

Contestant computers boot a Linux image that contains all the interpreters/compilers and documentation for the supported languages, some editors/IDEs(vim, Jetbrains, Eclipse, etc) and a web browser.

Network access is limited to the judging system only.

My experience in Europe is that most universities can support this.

If you're doing a good job, you have to do that anyway, or at least have enough of a spidey sense for broken code to know when to investigate and add an extra test case.

Something like 30% of the time at $WORK, interviewers report the candidate as having solved the problem when a closer inspection reveals UB, memory corruption, and other bullshit. The test cases pass, and I think that's part of the problem. You can't tune out and avoid deeply understanding the submission.

I think the problem is that the grader has to run your code in their head. That's a whole different problem.

I'd say compared to just typing the code on a disconnected computer: Not worth it.

The grader has to grade N exams.

How do you think English, philosophy, or history tests get graded?

Or were you just assuming your experiences (large university, I'm guessing) are universal?

There are many, many colleges that have no grad students. Period. They are undergraduate colleges.

Expecting any college or university to just be able to scale up the amount of manpower required to grade their classes/exams by a large multiple is absurdly unrealistic. I assure you that most existing colleges do have plenty of resources to effectively evaluate individual students' outputs, if they don't have to assume that anything submitted digitally is written by LLMs.

That new requirement is a massive change to how they operate, and it's incredibly rude and short-sighted to be dismissive and contemptuous of institutions that have trouble adjusting to it.

That Computer Science is somehow a privileged subject where the exam grading must be automated is elitism of the highest degree.

So in some theoretical hiring example, if I have to choose between two candidates: one which is really good at keeping the code in the head and the other who is less good at that, but who is very skilled at using programming tools like advanced type systems or formal verification tools, then I'd prefer the latter.

Of course in practice, I would of course take a student that I knew had passed their paper test with their own knowledge over a student that likely ran their digital test through an LLM.

> or whatever is the tech of the day.

Rote memorisation has been the standard technique probably for way longer that anything else so I’m not sure that every innovation is inherently inferior to what we had before

No wonder some people are so easy to replace with an LLM.

this would also end up valorizing particular ways of thinking or developing, so those whose development methodology is more exploratory until you get a certain point where you get an overarching view of how everything should interact and then go into a quicker iterative mode would be penalized.

I guess it's ok it does this, some things after all must be valorized whatever is chosen, although I've known many people who are quite good using this way of working who would then be downgraded.

Interesting. This reminds me of COBOL and FORTRAN "code sheets" that were used back in the day...

We had 3 hours to make the test. The papers the teacher delivered had differences between them (I think it was four different versions of the test?). The Teacher didn’t stay in the class also, you had to deliver the test to them later in their office.

IME, that kind of nitpicky grading mostly happens when the exam was designed too easy and does not depend on the medium.

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

Which you really need to do anyway because code that is broken due to a brainfart and code that is broken because of a fundamental misunderstanding should not receive the same grade.

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.

If you did it before then, barring physical limitations which have occurred since then, you would struggle for a short while and then you would be fine. I also did coursework purely on paper, got out of practice, and then once my kids were in school got back into the habit of handwriting. I can even write cursive again. Cursive makes it much easier on the hand and wrist. There's a reason it was invented. :)

I think you're missing the point. This is a physical limitation. People don't write as much as they used to. I used to be able to write for hours, taking notes, writing papers, etc... Now, I try to take notes during a meeting and my hand cramps. And as a bonus, my handwriting never was great, but now it's illegible for me.

Yes, we all "could" re-learn this skill, but how many people will? If you asked me to type a paper on a locked-down computer, I could easily. If you asked me to write a 2000 word paper by hand in an hour, I doubt it would happen.

If we expect students to take in-person tests on paper, then you should also do the rest of the classwork on paper. I am completely in the camp that we learn more when we write something. The physical act is part of the learning process. But you can't expect students to write an in-depth exam without having the practice of doing it often.

Are you using a fountain pen, writing cursive and do you take care to hold it properly? Those three things fixed all my cramps

For righties.

I'm right-handed, but I had to learn left-handed cursive at school when I spent 5 months with a cast on my right hand.

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.

Say what? Writing by hand is not only useful to write. It helps practice fine motor control. Something you need in many places in life, and most people have no practice of other than by writing.

Doing it now I really don't think I could deliver my intellectual best while worrying about if anyone can read my handwriting and whether I'm gonna cramp up by the end of the exam.

Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text.

Pen and paper are literally designed to produce text.

Can you say more? It's worked well for 4,500 years. Probably the most important invention ever.

So it’s like saying that clay tablets worked just fine for 1000+ years why would we switch to papyrus? Or who needs character for vowels? Or spaces between words, it’s not like anyone reads texts silently?

Then we got paper and pens and that was a pretty decent interim for a short period. Then about 100 years ago we got typing. Then about 20 years ago we reached a world where almost everyone is better at typing than they are at writing.

Obviously it's still important that people can write by hand, but expecting people to do it for more than a few hundred words at a time is idiotic. Would you like your clothes to be hand sewn too? That also worked for thousands of years (much longer than writing) but we stopped doing it for a very good reason.

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.

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.

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

But just having exposure to that material planted it in my mind and, in many cases, I revisited those topics later as an adult and learned them properly.

To be clear, I am not advocating for doing away with testing or schooling altogether. I am only pushing back on the idea that a 16 year old who doesn't care about cursive or calculus or Chaucer or whatever today won't ever care about those topics unless we mandate he pass an exam or course on it.

More broadly, my point is that there is a cost to "forcing them" as the grandparent advocates with regard to learning cursive. The moment you "force them" you also guarantee that some people won't graduate because of that extra requirement. There are other ways to enrich people's lives without force feeding, e.g., mention it and devote a question on an exam to it.

But I think you misinterpreted my comment -- I am not advocating for doing away with schooling or testing understanding in school in general, which is entirely my fault as my post was a bit unclear. But I agree with you that one should learn to read and write in school!

OP used the phrasing "force them", which I read as a stronger statement than "it'll be on the exam", and more "there will be an exam or entire course on this topic that must be passed or else". My point, more or less, was that there are many other more fundamental topics we already do this with other than cursive, and that adding another has a steep cost with uncertain payoff that is heavily dependent on the implementation.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I mean, I have no way of knowing if it's the former or the latter. But I've been noticing recently when people treat their traits as changeable and when they treat them as core to their being. I don't really have any faith that, in most cases, one can differentiate the two as much as one thinks one can.

For others, hearing stuff (and saying stuff) out loud is more useful. I had a friend who'd make nonsense songs of stuff to learn: just doggerel, but by singing it to himself when revising, he had a massive uptick in retention. He was so happy when he worked that out.

I imagine there might be other modes that work for other people too?

That's because "average" can mean either median, mean or mode depending on context.

Sorry! I'll see myself out.

... 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.

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.

What is the downside of learning cursive?

* Reading and responding to other people's emotions. * Emotional regulation. * Generalized sequencing. * Musical ability. * Counting. * Following patterns.

While you may see it as a waste, you may very well have benefited in significant ways from learning it at a young age.

So I would totally put it on the same level, theoretically. That is, you can write block letters with just as much skill and care as you can cursive, I think. Just like you can write cursive by just doing squiggly lines (as doctors write prescriptions).

Learning cursive (and other skills) in school is about trying to make sure opportunities for professions are not excluded.

While cursive is not a foundational skill (compare math and reading), it is a way to train fine motor control.

And it's not only the dental surgeons, but also dental hygienists... and doctors and surgeons (anyone who uses a scalpel). One could also look at various craftsmen such as jewelers and watchmakers.

Learning cursive is a way to make sure that we don't exclude people at an early age from professions that they might want to go into.

The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.

The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.

BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.

What's really important is handwriting itself. Block letters are honestly fine.

Writing in a good cursive (like the Spencerian script) is a bit faster and much easier on your hands, as you don't have to lift the pen as often. But that matters only when you need to write pages and pages of text.

My native language is Russian, and in Russian schools cursive was mandatory. Writing in block letters was seen as a sign of illiteracy.

I started learning English as a foreign language, and we didn't bother with cursive. So I kept writing in block letters for quite a while. I then started learning German, and our teacher taught us German cursive handwriting. I'm now using it for English as well :)

How interesting. I've always thought the cyrillic block letters look beautiful, whereas the cursive variant not so much. I learnt some russian and I've never bothered writing cursive because of this perception. Odd to realise now that the average russian seeing my writing would be dismissive instead of impressed!

> Odd to realise now that the average russian seeing my writing would be dismissive instead of impressed!

There's a HUGE difference between learning Russian as a native and as a foreign language. Especially if you can write! Russian spelling rules are quite opaque.

People will absolutely be impressed by your writing.

As a specific example, all of my friends in Germany - whether born there, in Eastern Europe, or whatever - use print letters, not cursive.

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.

Cursive vs printing (I'm guessing that's what you mean by "standard writing") is exactly the same, provided you can actually write in cursive. If you weren't taught in school, then sucks to be you, I guess? Modern pedagogy has a lot to answer for :(

The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.

BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.

(Apologies for repeating my reply from above here as well.)

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.

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.

Even a setup with cheap Raspberry Pi's? And Vim. (built-in bonus points for students being able to save and exit). Was just reading about LEAP[0][1] that thought you may find interesting if you have not yet seen it.

Separately, wanted to say I enjoyed your essay and appreciate how you think about improvement with a focus on the practical usefulness for the student.

TL;DR: I especially think the concept of Interview-Based Grading would be the way to go.

A couple progressive Whiteboard interviews for CS a semester, power point for Business etc. If they use AI to prepare, create material or learn/improve from then they are gaining the skills that will be required in real-world work. If they choose to not learn the material (or understand/check AI output) it would show during the back and forth with a panel of professors (dunno if you guys like working together though); built-in load sharing with a wider range of questions.

I guess with issues you mentioned the whole system needs overhauled for it to work. Adjusted for different courses -- and I dunno how practical this is but -- but why not let kids do more guided self-learning, keep office/lab hours for individual help. Fewer lectures due to self study with repurposed time for live evaluations. Eliminating non essential courses a student takes for a major/minor would also lessen the collective workload of professors (fewer student, but ones that want to be there).

That learning & evaluation set-up would be my dream college -- I would have pursued completely different life in that setup. I wanted to learn and engage, not prove I can regurgitate rote-memory notes that are handed out while my employment required me to grasp changing context and modify the code while not unwittingly automating the deletion of production dbs.

[0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/leap-low-bandwidth-educatio...

[1] https://github.com/T4EQ/leap

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.

It's fascinating to see all the people here who are arguing that it is impossible to do what we did all the time in my step-daughter's childhood, my childhood, my parents' childhoods, my grandparents' childhoods, etc.

What is practical changes over time. Insistence that "We always did X => That's enough" makes no sense in a universe where the only constant is change itself.

In 1926 it's not really practical to even have a global voice conversation, even world leaders must travel in person to properly negotiate or send trusted negotiators. By 1976 you can just pick up a phone and call from say Birmingham in England to Birmingham in Alabama, because why not. By 2026 you don't even think about which Birmingham the other party is in, they're both on the Network so you can talk to them, who cares?

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

The mid-term and final exams were not multiple choice (at least not entirely).

You can't give someone a multiple choice test and then give a written test to only those who passed it, except at the granularity of an entire course.

Much easier is to just have someone with authority in the room to hand out consequences to those who break the rules.

During an exam, it's an instant zero mark, on top of the after-school detention (the punishments escalate to suspension and expulsion for repeat offenses).

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.

We had a 'fix' for this back when they checked your TI83. It's a 2 line basic program to display "MEMORY CLEAR" the exact same way as if somebody had spent the time to find the actual memory clear function in the settings.

Also I was in high school in the prime time for this hack and I never saw someone actually use it despite the stories.

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

(Where do you even get ribbons these days)

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

Exams that only require paper, tables, and chairs can be done anywhere, and require minimal setup/set down, transport, or power, and no tech support.