13 ms·

College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

• recursivedoubts 7mo ago
  I used to make my classes 60-80% project work, 40-80% quizzes all online. I now do 50% project work, 50% in person quizzes, pencil on paper on page of notes. I'm increasingly going to paper-driven workflows as well, becoming an expert with the department printer, printing computer science papers for students to read and annotate in class, etc. Ironically, the traditional bureaucratic lag in university might actually help: we still have a lot of infrastructure for this sort of thing, and university degrees may actually signal competence-beyond-ai-prompting in the future. We'll see.
  • zamadatix 7mo ago
    I always preferred the "you get some grades along the way to gauge your progress but the lion's share of the weight went to the proctored exams" method unless the lion's share of the normal work was also proctored anyways (at which point it doesn't really matter how it's done). The reason was less for myself and more because anything group related suddenly shot up in quality when the other individual work classmates were graded on couldn't be fudged.
    • bee_rider 7mo ago
      The things I don’t like about putting too much weight in the exams are: * It’s sort of unnecessarily high stakes for the students; a couple hours to determine your grade for many hours of studying. * It’s pretty artificial in general; in “real life” you have the ability to go around online and look for sources. This puts a pretty low ceiling on the level of complexity you can actually throw at them.
      • deepsun 7mo ago
        I think it's all about speed. In "real life" everything can be looked up, but exam optimizes to not even having to look it up. Then any research becomes much faster. Whether it's good or bad I don't know, I think US higher education focuses too much on ability to produce huge amounts of mediocre work, but that's the idea behind exams.
        • eichin 7mo ago
          One of the reasons I've always encouraged software people to learn to touch type has nothing to do with typing speed - it's about reducing/eliminating the cognitive load of typing, you want to be thinking in expressions (sentences) not letters. (The increase in effectiveness comes from not getting distracted by the mechanics of typing...)
      • simpaticoder 7mo ago
        In real life you need to know the options and their trade-offs to solve a given problem. You don't need to know all the techniques perfectly, but you do need to be able to characterize them and compare them, from rote memory.
        • acbart 7mo ago
          I agree, I think many people who rail against exams underestimate how important memory is to more complicated skills. How can you debug a complex application if you have to keep looking up every operator and keyword in the language you're using? It'd be like trying to interpret poetry in a foreign language but you have to look up every single noun. I'm not saying people can't do it, but it's tedious, slow, and you probably wouldn't think of them as a "professional worth paying for their service". Some amount of memorization is key.
          • kelnos 7mo ago
            It still doesn't feel to me that those things are similar. A sit-down exam is a time-limited, high-pressure situation where you're expected to demonstrate proficiency in the things you've learned over the past several months. Sure, much of that learning builds on stuff you've learned previously, but the focus is on the prior semester (or half-semeter, for mid-terms). When I sit down to debug a complex application, I'm drawing my prior 25+ years of experience. While I certainly would rather fix the problem faster rather than slower, I don't have a time limit, and usually taking my time (or even leaving the problem alone for hours or days) can be more effective than trying to work quickly and get everything done immediate. The last time I sat for an exam was in 2003, and I honestly have not experienced anything in life since then that feels like that. Even job interviews have not felt similar enough to me to evoke that same feeling. (Frankly, I've enjoyed most job interviews; I don't think I've ever enjoyed an exam.) That's just my experience, of course, but I don't feel like an outlier.
      • zamadatix 7mo ago
        This is where the alternative of a course with the other (still monitored for graded activities) option comes in. The downside of that tends to force in person synchronous rather than custom scheduling of regular tests. The point is more about whether the graded work is actively reviewed than which individual choice is ideal or not though. Whether it's electronic or written, remote or in person, weighted towards exams vs continuous are all orthogonal debates to the problem of cheating/falsely claiming work. I had attended a few courses over a decade ago and just completed a degree recently. The methods of cheating have changed, but not because of pencils vs keyboards.
      • acbart 7mo ago
        Exams happen all the time in real life. Or rather, situations where you can't just look up fundamental knowledge. Job interviews, presentations, even mundane work tasks - all these require you to know the basics quickly "The basics" are relative, of course, but I often point out to my students: "you don't care if your doctor needs to look up the specific interactions of your various meds. You do care if you see them googling 'what is an appendix'." Proctored, in-person exams are the only reliable mechanism we have for ascertaining if a specific individual has mastered key fundamentals and can answer relevant questions about them in a relatively timely fashion. Everything else is details and thresholds - how fast do you need to be able to recall, how deep, what details are fundamental. From there, I think it's fine to hate poorly made exams, and it's a given that many folks making exams have no idea what they're doing (or don't have the resources to do it right). But the premise of an exam is not completely divorced from reality.
        • kelnos 7mo ago
          I think many of us would agree that job interviews (in tech at least) are horribly broken, because they don't do a good job of testing candidates' ability to do the actual work they'll be doing day-to-day. So saying exams are like job interviews is not a positive for exams. And, for most people, the ideal is to find a job and stick with it for years, so it's not like job interviews are common, everyday occurrences. For presentations, usually you spend a lot of time preparing for them (similar to exams), building a slide deck or pages of notes that you refer to while giving the talk (not similar to exams). Sure, you do have to be able to think on your feet, but I don't think the comparison to a sit-down exam is all that apt. For mundane work tasks, you have the internet and whatever reference materials you want (including LLMs, these days); this sort of thing is so different from a sit-down exam that it's almost comical that you'd try to equate the two. I'm not saying I know of a better way to evaluate learning than proctored, in-person exams, but suggesting that sort of situation is particularly relevant to real life... no, no way.
          • mettamage 7mo ago
            Having been both a data analyst and software engineer I agree. The data analyst one? Here is 50K of Excel rows with all kinds of weirdness in it, you're data analyst right? You have 4 hours to analyze this data. Go! The software engineer one: here is a takehome assignment. One week later: finished! To be fair, they both represented pretty well what work I'm going to do. The data analyst didn't show that well how much I'd also be data engineering, but whatever, I was a SWE before having a DA stint. Back to SWE again though.
      • dublinstats 7mo ago
        High stakes artificial exams can help prepare you for artificial stakes at job interviews where you need to crank out a working solution in 30 mins with jet lag and someone looking over your shoulder
        • ssl-3 7mo ago
          That's true. They do better-prepare an applicant for a job that filters on a person's ability to accomplish arbitrary things in a vacuum that is completely disconnected from the real world. That's probably a good thing to filter on for, say, the navigation role on all kinds of crafts (from land to sea to space). There are naval roles where navigating with a sextant and memory is an important skill to have, and to test for. But that operating-in-a-vacuum skill doesn't relate well to roles that don't need to exist in a vacuum. In most of the jobs in the real world, we get to use tools -- and when the tools go out to lunch, we don't revert to the Old Ways. When an accountant's computer dies, they don't transition back to written arithmetic and paper ledgers. Instead, someone who fixes computers gets it going again, and they get back to work as soon as that's done.
          • dublinstats 7mo ago
            Obviously they're both supposed to be proxy measures, not realistic scenarios. I was mostly joking before but I do think exams provide a pretty good proxy for ability in the subject if the teacher is decent. Interviews not so much unless the applicant is similarly prepared with foreknowledge of what they will be tested on and had some time to prepare and given recent practice.
      • II2II 7mo ago
        > It’s pretty artificial in general; in “real life” you have the ability to go around online and look for sources. Sort of. In real life, you are expected to have immediate knowledge of your field and (in some environments) be able to perform under pressure. I'm not going to pretend the curriculum is a perfect match for what people should know, but it does provide a common baseline to be able to have a common point of reference when communicating with colleagues. I would suggest the most artificial thing about exams is the format. > It’s sort of unnecessarily high stakes for the students; a couple hours to determine your grade for many hours of studying. I don't like dismissing the ordeal of people who face test anxiety, but tests are not really high stakes. There is a potential that a person will have to repeat a course if it is a requirement for their degree. At least at the institutions I attended, the grade distribution across exams and assignments, combined with a late drop date, meant that failing a course was only an option if you choose it to be. A student may be forced to face some realities about their dedication/priorities, work habits, time management, interests, abilities, etc.. It may force a student to make some hard decisions about where they want their life to lead, but it does not bar them from success in life. And those are the worse case scenarios. A more typical scenario is that you end up with a lower GPA.
        • fluoridation 7mo ago
          >There is a potential that a person will have to repeat a course if it is a requirement for their degree. How is that not high stakes? The result of several months worth of effort hinges on what they do during a 2-3-hour window. If you had to build something and the last step involved a procedure that could potentially tear down everything you made, you would try to find a way to redesign it so that didn't happen, or to limit the scope of the damage.
      • lelanthran 7mo ago
        > It’s pretty artificial in general; in “real life” you have the ability to go around online and look for sources. I dunno how you work, but I'd be getting raised eyebrows from people watching my hit google for any question required of my role. I mean, we're not talking about using calculators here, and we're not talking about vocational training (How do I do $FOO, in docker? In K8s? How do I write a GH runner? Basically any question that involves some million-dollar company's product). We're talking about college stuff; you absolutely should not be allowed to look up linked lists for the first time during an exam, copy the implementation from wikipedia, port it to your language and move on. In the real world, we want people who mostly know what to do. The real world is time-constrained (you could spend 2 hours learning to do what they thought you could do based on your diploma, but they'd be pissed to find out that you need to look up everything because that's how you coasted through college). Exam situations are more like the real world than take-home assignments: High-stakes, high-pressure, timeboxed. If your real world does not have high-stakes, high-pressure, timeboxed tasks, then you really haven't had much contact outside of your bubble.
      • Al-Khwarizmi 7mo ago
        To me, exams are just like democracy. The worst form of evaluation, except for all others that have been tried.
      • Shorel 7mo ago
        If you want an easy, stress free job, sure, nothing is high stakes. You will never be invited to meetings with executives, and you can google everything all the time. If you, on the other hand, attend meetings, you will need both deep knowledge (requires many hours of styding) and fast thinking, and the questions will make you realize you know little about many things. You need to have general knowledge of many things, not just whatever you are building at the moment. If you are successful on these meetings, your salary can and will grow. Also, some meetings will make you realize that college and/or university are life in easy mode. Very few things you consider hard in college will be work-level hard.
  • api 7mo ago
    The last point is very interesting and might keep universities relevant.
  • acbart 7mo ago
    So at 50%, someone who uses AI to get 100% of the homework grade will earn a D (sometimes passing) if they can get at least a 20% on your quizzes, and a C (always passing) if they get at least a 40%. Did you make your exam so difficult that students who truly didn't learn the material earn less than 20-40%? Because if it was, say, multiple choice questions with four possible answers, then you can expect them to earn at least 25% just by chance.
    • recursivedoubts 7mo ago
      My quizzes are written responses, psuedocode and annotating code.
      • blharr 7mo ago
        While that answers their direct question, they do bring up a good point -- how often are you handing out less than 25% scores on exams? Id imagine any professor to do that to get some severe criticism that would make even a cheater pretty livid
  • bartvk 7mo ago
    This. All the drama articles in the media are describing lazy institutions. My tests are almost 100% in person. Project work included, you can hand something in, but I'm going over line by line and ask what you did there. I can do this, because while my school hasn't updated the tests yet, my classes are small and I can do all of them in-person.
    • TychoCelchuuu 7mo ago
      [dead]
• CalChris 7mo ago
  Next up: allow slide rules on exams.
  • teeray 7mo ago
    Were they ever banned?
    • bombcar 7mo ago
      Probably around the time they were invented. They were mandatory on my ground exam (private pilot).
      • vunderba 7mo ago
        OOC was this a while ago? Even when I took the ground exam around 10 years ago, everyone had electronic flight computer calculators (CX-2s).
        • bombcar 7mo ago
          It was awhile ago (init var me == old;) - back in the era of "iPads can't be used for critical flight information, they're too unreliable".
          • vunderba 7mo ago
            That makes sense. The CX-2 calculators are a bit less like the iPad era and more like the equivalent of calc I/II classes which only let you use specific TI models versus an app on your smartphone. It reminds me of a family friend who's a bit older and did their scuba certification using dive tables, whereas when I did my PADI, I was able to use a dive computer.
• Swizec 7mo ago
  When I was in college, your grade fully depended on the oral exam/debate with the professor. Everything else was but the entry ticket. Not sure anyone even attempted to cheat in that scenario. And the conversations were usually great, although very stressful for us cramming types
  • mjlee 7mo ago
    This sounds extremely susceptible to unconscious bias, or even just straightforward discrimination.
    • Swizec 7mo ago
      It does! That’s why you can ask to be evaluated by a commission of professors. If you don’t pass after 3 tries, commission is mandatory. You also have a paper trail of written exams and midterms to back you up. If you keep getting good grades and failing the oral, people will find that obviously suspicious. Honestly the only times I had any trouble in the orals were the exams where I baaaaarely passed the written. Usually oral feels like the chill easy part compared to written because you can have a back-n-forth with the professor.
      • Terr_ 7mo ago
        > It does! That’s why you can ask to be evaluated by a commission of professors. Still concerning from a statistical/psych fairness aspect. There's a famous example of the Boston Symphony trying to fairly judge unseen applicants in 1952, and their results kept getting gender-skewed until they adjusted for the fact judges were reacting to the sound of shoes (e.g. high heels) when the candidate moved around behind the divider.
      • ryukoposting 7mo ago
        > That’s why you can ask to be evaluated by a commission of professors. Ah yes, the classic "if you think the system is abusing you, you shall out yourself to the system that's abusing you if you want any chance of recourse." Because a tribunal run by the people you're lodging a complaint against can't possibly be biased.
• syngrog66 7mo ago
  One consequence of LLM fraud at scale making remote/online tests & document submission worthless is it might act as a giant revitalizing boost for the bricks-and-mortars school systems. Suddenly having real teachers and students in room together has value again, for credibility and authenticity alone. LLMs are also making having a public repo code portfolio be much more worthless as a sign of legitimacy
• onesociety2022 7mo ago
  If AI can do the work, maybe the test should be more focused on what AI can’t do? This is like anyone still doing a traditional coding interview with leetcode problems just because they haven’t yet done the work to figure out what to test for in a world where Claude Code exists.
  • ceejayoz 7mo ago
    There are plenty of things AI can do that students still benefit from learning.
  • Planktonne 7mo ago
    The goal of the educational process isn't the test paper, it's the learning. Gyms aren't redundant because tractors exist.
    • llbbdd 7mo ago
      Gyms are a great example actually because tractors exist to do the economically useful work. You now optionally go to the gym to benefit from fake labor that used to be the side effect of useful work. The fake labor is now what colleges are trying to sell, and it's going to kill them.
      • cumshitpiss 7mo ago
        [dead]
      • Planktonne 7mo ago
        Gyms predate tractors.
        • llbbdd 7mo ago
          3,000 years ago, physical labor was a component of most jobs. Today gyms are for people who can afford to attend them and don't have a day job that naturally exercises them through labor. People exercising purely for health benefits, and not because the strength benefits them in their job and in other facets of their life, is new.
• whartung 7mo ago
  What's interesting is that as I understand, folks are using things like Google Docs for papers, and that it's (apparently) straight forward to do analysis on a Google Doc to see, well, the life of the document. How it was typed in, how fast, what was pasted and cut back out. My understanding is that the Google Doc is not a word processing document, it's an event recording of a word processor. So, in theory, you could just "play back" watching the document being typed in and built to "see" how it was done. I only mention this because given the AIs, I'm sure even with a typewriter, it's more efficient to have the AI do the work, and then just "type it in" to the typewriter, which kind of invalidates the entire purpose of it in the first place. The typing in part is inevitable. May as well have a "perfect first draft" to type it in from in the first place. And we won't mention the old retro interfaces that let you plug in a IBM Selectric as a printer for your computer. (My favorite was a bunch of solenoids mounted above the keys -- functional, but, boy, what a hack.) TaaS -- Typing as a service. Send us your Markdown file and receive a typed up, double spaced copy via express shipping the next day!
  • nlawalker 7mo ago
    Typing as a service is a whole cottage industry on Etsy.
    • ssl-3 7mo ago
      That's certainly one way to abstractly automate a task: Just pay someone else to do it. (This is a concept that regular people employ every day in the real world.) Another way to automate this particular task is that some typewriters have (serial/parallel) ports to connect to a computer. It's not a daunting task at all for a student who is skilled in the art of using the bot to have one of these typewrites be the output target. Like this: https://chatgpt.com/share/69e405db-1b44-83ea-baf3-6af41fe577b0 https://chatgpt.com/share/69e405db-1b44-83ea-baf3-6af41fe577...
  • tejtm 7mo ago
    arms race.... oh look there is a llm trained on key loggers to spew slop at your personally predicted error rate; bonus if it identifies to USB as keyboard.
• gentleman11 7mo ago
  I had a typewriter growing up and I remember thinking it was the coolest thing. I was amazed by it and tried writing several stories. Eventually my dad bought me a crappy old computer that was only really good for writing, and that was cool too. I loved that thing. It was small too, with an integrated monitor and keyboard, so it didn't take over the whole desk where I still used pencil and paper often Imagine being able to do some writing without notifications going off every few seconds, and where you're not always one click away from a search engine and some website scientifically designed to drag your attention down a rabbit hole and keep it there
  • eichin 7mo ago
    There's an entire industry of "distraction free writing devices" based mostly on that nostalgia/yearning (not to say that it isn't effective, but the effectiveness is not actually being measured :-)
    • dlivingston 7mo ago
      I have an old MacBook Air I flashed with writerdeckOS [0]. Feels like a digital typewriter. [0]: https://writerdeckos.com/ https://writerdeckos.com/
• singpolyma3 7mo ago
  If students cheat they hurt only themselves. Make sure they understand the consequences for cheating (missing out on learning) and that's about all you can do.
  • delusional 7mo ago
    When i attended university (almost a decade ago i guess, time flies) we didn't have a single exam on the computer. All exams were on paper or oral, most were without notes too. Computer science does not require computers.
  • ButlerianJihad 7mo ago
    This is usually true, but it is also true that some classes are graded "on a curve" and so grade inflation could hurt people who are honestly doing work. Also, cheaters tend to suck all the air out of a room. For example, my I.T. instructor designed a really nice oral quiz slide-show for the entire classroom. I found it a few hours before the class, I watched it in its entirety, and then when he tried to run it live, I spoilered all the answers before any other student could answer. I wasn't strictly cheating, but I wasn't being fair to my classmates' learning process, either.
  • paleotrope 7mo ago
    Well from a certain perspective they are also hurting the schools reputation, the programs reputation, and ultimately their fellow students.
  • mcmcmc 7mo ago
    This is untrue. Students who graduate without actually absorbing knowledge as laid out in the curriculum devalue the degree when they show up in the workforce lacking that knowledge. This is part of why new grads are undesirable job candidates, there’s a chance you are paying a higher wage for someone who may not have learned anything.
  • eszed 7mo ago
    Depends on your measuring stick. Cheating themselves out of an education? Yep. Cheating themselves into a credential -> job - the status / remuneration of which is almost entirely divorced from the quality of the education, being aligned rather with the name of the organization on the diploma. Former (second-generation) college professor, here. I find it almost impossible to be cynical enough about the US education industry.
• gorgoiler 7mo ago
  I’m confused about too many things being measured at once. Is Phelps banning AI to ensure her students are fit to pass terminal examination? And doing so to ensure that her class has a good pass rate, proving she is a good teacher and can keep her job? What if her cohort are particularly dumb? Is she incentivized to make it easy to pass her classes to get that A you paid so much for? Or hard or make that A worth something? My mentor, a PhD in classics, told me it was never about outcomes and only about improvement. I suppose that answers my question. If your AI gets you an A at the start of the course and an A at the end, then, in the sense that you have not succeeded over anything, you have failed.
  • PebblesRox 7mo ago
    My impression was she just brings the typewriters into class as a one-day novelty thing per course, not that it becomes the norm for the whole semester. The goal is to give the students a taste of what the old-fashioned way is like, to get them thinking about it.
• rvz 7mo ago
  The college instructor might as well ban calculators and use abacuses then.
  • sarchertech 7mo ago
    We couldn’t use graphing calculators on calculus exams. There were professors who banned calculators entirely.
  • fl4regun 7mo ago
    at my university in math exams we were only allowed to use 1 specific model of calculator, and most of the exams were answered symbolically anyways, so the calculator usually was not helpful anyways.
  • tekla 7mo ago
    I'm confused at these comments because it makes me think the commenter didn't go to college. All my classes were basically open everything except for a literal laptop. Calculators were not useful.
• throwatdem12311 7mo ago
  When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.
  • nsyne 7mo ago
    I personally dislike placing a heavy emphasis on exams. Assignments/projects have been consistently the most enjoyable and rewarding parts of the courses I've taken so far in university. It's a shame that they are also way more susceptible to cheating with AI.
    • gpm 7mo ago
      Also way more susceptible to cheating in traditional non-AI ways. And your mark ends up depending a lot on how much time you have to invest independent of how good you are at the course material. Assignments and projects are great for learning, but suck for evaluation.
      • lokar 7mo ago
        I really appreciated classes where there was rapidly demising returns to time spent :) Another example, lit classes where the grade is based on time limited, open book exams, hand written in "blue books" Read the book, pay attention in class, spend 90 min writing an essay, and you are done.
      • jason_zig 7mo ago
        is evaluation that important? ultimately if you can't do the work you're only cheating yourself in the long run...
        • jmye 7mo ago
          Yes. I care that the work I've done and what I've learned is actually good and correct. Vibes-based learning/anything is valueless.
• llbbdd 7mo ago
  Might be an unpopular opinion in this thread, but college was made worthless for most degrees as soon as the internet got popular and silly performative shit like this is the death knell. College is about learning how to work in an industry. I'd predict an uptick in trade schools and other hands-on work like medicine, and a continuing downturn in so-called formal education for anything white-collar, programming included. Students are customers. Businesses are going to use AI going forward. No reason to waste time on this.
  • hackable_sand 7mo ago
    > College is about learning how to work in an industry. Oh
    • llbbdd 7mo ago
      Education is a nice side effect sometimes but yeah, I don't know how you could reach any other conclusion. If you're motivated to learn for learning's sake, college is an annoying slog that you know you don't need post-millenium. I literally left college early and started making money instead of spending it, because I got tired of demonstrating to my professors that I already knew everything they were teaching and that it'd be a waste of time for me to come to class.
      • sarchertech 7mo ago
        Or maybe you chose to waste your time because you treated college as a way to get a piece paper instead of as the only time in your life when you are surrounded by experts who will spend an hour a week answering any questions you can think of.
        • llbbdd 7mo ago
          No time wasted at all, that option is also trivially available outside of college, it's called "email". There's a whole industry in tricking new adults into believing that college is not about getting a piece of paper, it's gross, and it's avoidable. I paid off a year of unnecessary college debt in 1/4 of a year of doing real work I learned how to do in my free time. It's a trap and articles like this where colleges are working as hard they can to make education less useful prove it.
• arcfour 7mo ago
  Pfft, just grab a teletype and run lpr -P ttyUSB0 ai_generated_report.txt ;-)
• RhysabOweyn 7mo ago
  Why are people promoting the idea that exams are not written or given in person anymore? I graduated relatively recently and maybe had 1 take home exam during my entire education. Every other exam was proctored in person and written. The professor who made the take home exam also made it much more difficult than a normal exam so I would not really say it was easier than a normal in person test.
  • dublinstats 7mo ago
    Take home exams were very common when I was in school, which was before you could get answers on the internet. After internet answer and cheating sites came along, a professor would have to either not care and let cheating run rampant, or struggle to constantly make unique new kinds of take home questions somehow. AI has basically killed that option too.
  • bmitc 7mo ago
    I loved take home exams because they allowed me to study before hand but not have the insane pressure and condensed studying required for exams in the classroom. Even though they were normally much harder and longer, I liked them. I felt I learned much more through them because I could take the time to understand concepts I had missed without feeling the time pressure of in-person exams. It's a shame that humans find a way to cheat ourselves out of things that benefit us by over "optimizing" the wrong things.
    • ghighi7878 7mo ago
      Exams in classroom with all the time pressure is also an important part of education. May be they should be low percentage of grade to prevent too much stress but it's am important learning experience
      • bmitc 7mo ago
        I disagree. Take home exams represent how work and progress occurs in the "real" world. There's nothing in the post education world that resembles in-person exams. Maybe the medical profession is a counter example.
• opengrass 7mo ago
  Better dust off that old AlphaSmart!
• dyauspitr 7mo ago
  Just have them write it out. “Ain’t nobody got a goddamn typewriter”.
• fizlebit 7mo ago
  I think if your university doesn't do in person exams with pen and paper then the degrees it hands out are not much evidence of anything. If you're not interested in learning the course content, then what are you doing there? Pretty expensive waste of time. I very fondly recall many of the course I did at university. The exams were a helpful motivating factor even for the interesting courses.
• pbgcp2026 7mo ago
  ... meanwhile, all these students graduate, can't find jobs and become plumbers or bricklayers.
• SilentM68 7mo ago
  This will only work until somebody figures out how to connect an AI to the typewriter which will have some sort of MIC, and the person will start dictating into it with AI-assisted revisions. Once the dictation is over, the AI-enabled typewriter will be instructed to type the work out. Testing and instruction should be modified to account for AI. If a student uses an Agentic AI for work, learning, research, then when test time comes, the student should be required to stand in the front of the class and teach the class what they have learned, i.e. "Teach Back" all they learned to the entire class student body and teacher. The entire class, instructor included, will also be required to participate in a Q&A session to make sure that student's learning is not just made up of memorization, e.g. restate the information learned but using different words, different scenarios, etc.
• somewhereoutth 7mo ago
  I like open note exams (and perhaps open book exams, as you need to know the book well to know which page to look at) - it forces you to condense the material to the salient points and operationalise it to solve what would be more challenging problems than a simple recall exam. When I see 'cheat sheets' - designed to be hidden on the back of calculators or whatever - then I see true application of human ingenuity and intellect.
• WillAdams 7mo ago
  A hand-written essay in class would seem to be a workable mechanism for a student to demonstrate an ability to reason on their own about a subject. One of my best college professors would review such essays in-person, one-on-one twice each semester.
• randoments 7mo ago
  Reading all these comments, I feel like US universities are a joke. I had to do all the exams in person. 100% of the grade was decided at the exam. Millions of people graduated this way and they are fine. No students were harmed in the process.
  • tyrust 7mo ago
    Did you never have to write a research paper?
  • meroes 7mo ago
    No projects, no labs, no teamwork, no papers? What a narrow set of skills to send into your economy.
    • ivankelly 7mo ago
      Given the way things are going, not knowing how to use AI will be like coming out not knowing about revision control
      • maplethorpe 7mo ago
        Isn't the selling point of AI that it does it for you? What's to learn?
        • lacy_tinpot 7mo ago
          If the AI does it for you, you need to still learn what to do. What is the "it" that AI does for you? This is assuming you know how to get good work out of AI in the first place. But even that is turning out to be a skill in and of itself.
        • Levitz 7mo ago
          "It does X for you" is the point of many technologies. You still require knowledge to work around it. Context helps immensely, for example. Think of what you can do that someone outside tech can't.
• lizknope 7mo ago
  My school couldn't afford typewriters in the 1980's and early 1990's. We wrote assignments by hand using a pencil or pen. Is that really complicated? When I got to college and everything had to be typed I still wrote everything by hand on paper and edited with an eraser and a red pen to reorganize some sentences or paragraphs. Then I would go to the computer lab and type it in and print it out.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• SamHenryCliff 7mo ago
  [dead]
• paulorlando 7mo ago
  I like this. Related, this semester I've been using handwritten quizzes in class. A simple change that's been one of the best things as it changed students' expectations of class prep. Kind of do the readings and sort of prep and you can coast in class. But if you need to write out quiz answers you're forced to know the material better as well as maintain the ability to express yourself. I also use low-point bonus questions to test general knowledge (huge variation on subjects I thought everyone knew).
  • binarycrusader 7mo ago
    I’ve been typing for years since the 80s. However, even in the 90s I found any extended period of handwriting to be painful and laborious. I don’t think I could handle an instructor that insisted on handwritten long form but I’d happily accept a compromise in the form of a typewriter.
    • paulorlando 7mo ago
      Sorry to say you can't take my class.
      • 2b3a51 7mo ago
        Does the institution in which your class occurs not have special access procedures? e.g stroke or permanent hand disability
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
• linsomniac 7mo ago
  ... and the price of daisywheel printers is skyrocketing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing
• ninjahawk1 7mo ago
  In one of my classes the approach was the opposite, I’m expected to do Ph.D level work as an undergrad and am expected to use AI. In a different one she just said so long as you say AI was used you’re fine to use it. In the rest of them AI is considered cheating. To say we have discrepancies in the rules in an understatement. No one seems to have the exact answer on how to do it. I personally feel like expecting Ph.D level work is the best method as of now, I’ve learned more by using AI to do things about my head than hard core studying for a semester.
  • raincole 7mo ago
    Now at least you're an adult already. Imagine what mixed messages schoolchild's are receiving from their teachers...
  • leptons 7mo ago
    >I’ve learned more by using AI to do things about my head than hard core studying for a semester. How do you know you actually learned, instead of being fed slop by the AI that isn't true at all? If you didn't study, then I doubt you'll really know if the AI is lying to you or not. I have to wonder if your teacher will too, sounds like they have kind of checked-out from actually teaching.
  • terrabitz 7mo ago
    It's not inherently contradictory, just like using a calculator could be considered cheating depending on the context. If you're just learning basic arithmetic, a calculator is cheating since it shortcuts the path to learning. OTOH in calculus, a calculator is necessary. You still have to have a deep understanding of the concepts and functions to succeed. It's still a new tech so I'm not surprised a lot of teachers have different takes on it. But when it comes to education, I feel like different policies are reasonable. In some cases it's more likely to shortcut learning, and in other cases it's more likely to encourage learning. It's not entirely one or the other.
    • Moonye666 7mo ago
      [flagged]
• amingilani 7mo ago
  A typewriter tty would be a fun weekend project.
• banana_sandwich 7mo ago
  i mean, you can just have AI still do the work, you’re just doing data entry with a type writer.
  • oblio 7mo ago
    Doing the data entry might mean you actually learn something. Fairly sure that writing by hand has this effect to some degree.
• erelong 7mo ago
  Things like this are well-intentioned but idk why there aren't more teachers creating optional "side quests" like these for students that want them instead of forcing them to do things like these optional "side quests" would allow teachers to create some standard accepted "main quest" curriculum and then just create a bunch of (even possibly "fun") "side quests" students can work on in their spare time for extra skill development
• deleted 7mo ago
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• azhenley 7mo ago
  I spoke with a bunch of profs about how they were assessing students in the age of AI: https://austinhenley.com/blog/aihomework.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/aihomework.html
• sonzohan 7mo ago
  Uni professor here. My colleagues that teach hard skills courses (like data structures and algorithms) either love AI and incorporate it into their teaching at every moment possible, or despise it in the same way graphing calculators were by high school math teachers when they were introduced nearly 30 years ago. I teach soft skills classes to engineering students, and I'm unconcerned with students using AI. I write my problems in a way such that, if the student truly understands the assignment, prompting the AI to solve the problem and iterating on it takes a similar amount of time to doing the work themselves. AI is not very good at writing introspectively about the student. In other words, AI isn't going to be helpful when the homework question is "A fellow student comes to you asking for suggestions on how to maximize their chances at landing an internship. What advice do you give them that's immediately actionable?" Try it, plug that into ChatGPT or your favorite LLM. It parrots the same generic tips everyone tells you, with very little on "how" do perform the action in an effective way. Read it, copy it into your advice document, get a poor grade. Try telling other students to take this advice. Note how they don't because the advice isn't actually actionable enough for them to take action. LLMs are also not very good at the follow-up question "In a previous assignment you gave specific and actionable advice to a peer on the job search. Which of these suggestions were so good you are now doing them?" A number of students write a "Mental Gymnastics" essay, claiming they are following all their suggestions (because they think that's what the professor wants to hear) while the evidence they provide demonstrates they are not. A student asking an LLM to write the essay for them consistently produces a digital 'pat on the back'; a mental gymnastics essay that ultimately makes the student realize how unwilling they are to solve the #1 problem in their college career. I've done away with exams wherever possible. I stick to project-heavy courses. What I've found to be far more concerning than AI use is the increasing loss of social skills and ability to cooperate within the younger generations. The number of students who would prefer to fail a class instead of talk to literally any human being is astounding. The number of students who refuse to build soft skills, and believe that tech is truly a meritocracy where the only thing that matters is 'lines of code', there's no politics, and they won't work call or crunch or give code reviews, is also astounding.
• eranation 7mo ago
  Soon on Show HN: I built an open source tool that controls your electric typewriter.
• resident423 7mo ago
  Is there really much point though? I think AI will keep improving, and there will be more and more incentive to use an AI which costs $20/month, instead of a human writer that costs $30/hour. If someone want's an article written, and if people like the AI article as much as the human one, what stops anyone everyone using AI? The only answer I can think of is that people must believe AI writing will stay below human level for many years, but if so why?
  • lombasihir 7mo ago
    i dont think that way, ai will became better, but human-taste writing just feels different. like hand-made furniture vs factory-made furniture. they have different class.
    • resident423 7mo ago
      I think the AI writing becoming better means it will appear more human rather than like better AI writing. I think the difference in feeling is similar to early attempts to generate faces with AI, which also seemed wierdly wrong in ways which were hard to describe, but now it's very hard to tell them apart.
  • medbar 7mo ago
    OP is about a German learning class, so yes, there is a point. AI improving will not learn you a language faster than immersing in it until, I suppose, neural links become mainstream.
• zoom6628 7mo ago
  FWIW my Dad taught me how to type at 4yo on a huge Imperial typewriter. My spelling took an enormous leap in capability in a few weeks. Primary school teachers were amazed at the words I could spell correctly. (Didn't help my handwriting though which was still like intoxicated chicken scratch on a good day).
• ourmandave 7mo ago
  Next on Show HN: I built a voice activated typewriter.
• EverMemory 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• erickhill 7mo ago
  Remembering my college typewriter-use-by-quarters (coins) on a timer like being at the laundromat, I kind of love this. At UT Arlington in the Stone Age we had a typewriter lab so folks without home computers with printers could still produce their papers typed, which was required. I had to get a roll of quarters ($10) to do a single paper. And the erase tape was always so used up it was useless. It was one of the most sadistic things I remember about my college experience, trying to type on those crappy typewriter on a timer. With no errors. And I literally wrote it by hand before trying to transcribe it. Good luck, we’re all counting on you.
• 14 7mo ago
  When I was a kid we were told no calculators because when you grow up and are in the real world it's not like you will have a calculator with you at all times. Fast forward to today and we all have a calculator on our phones. I think AI should be treated the same. Who cares if it assists in a lot of the work that is a good thing. BUT as we all know AI has been incorrect on many things so I think what would be a much better learning practice would be to forget if AI wrote the paper and focus heavily on students backing up their claims with sources. So if your paper says ABC is true and AI writes it up in a perfect paragraph you would still need to confirm the facts as true and find a reputable source that shows it to be true.
• ryanSrich 7mo ago
  For programming, the way I would build a curriculum is to force students to actually learn how to program and code first. This is simple by requiring them to write code inside the classroom by hand for all exams. I would make this the focus for 90% of the first 2 years of their degree. I would then have them spend 75% of their last 2 years learning how to use and program with AI. Aside from knowing how things actually work, there's no more important skill now than mastering AI.
  • delis-thumbs-7e 7mo ago
    First part is basically my degree. You can cheat as much you want, but when you have to write algorithms by hand on paper in the exam it doesn’t matter - you will have to learn. Then depending what you want to do for masters it’s basically machine learning, which mostly mathematics. I don’t know why you’d need to teach anyone to code with LMM’s though. If you are a CS major (or any reasonably intelligent person) and can’t figure it out on your own, well, workd needs bakers and carpenters still you know? What I am learning is mathematics, which what all CS including AI and machine learning, really is. ”Mastering AI” for me means building your own models and AI applications and undestanding linear algebra, multivariable calculus and the propability theory behind it all.
• zx8080 7mo ago
  After 30 seconds the site shows a fullscreen popup: > The Sentinel not only cares deeply about bringing our readers accurate and critical news, we insist all of the crucial stories we provide are available for everyone — for free. Thank you very much for interrupting and ruining my reading experience of your article.
  • breve 7mo ago
    What? And after all that money you paid them? The nerve!
    • Our_Benefactors 7mo ago
      Your worldview sucks. Essentially claiming that in order to receive information, you must also receive garbage useless information to brainwash you.
      • breve 7mo ago
        No, complaining about something offered for free because of a minor pop up is what sucks. It's a bizarre sense of entitlement. If you don't like the website, simply don't use it. Especially when you're making no contribution to it.
        • ethmarks 7mo ago
          I don't think that complaining about things necessitates believing that you're entitled to them. I agree that complaining about things you received for free is in rather poor taste, but I don't think that it's morally wrong in the way that you seem to think it is. If an article you read for free had a pop-up ad on it, you have not been wronged in any way and do not have grounds to sue them, but you should be permitted to voice your complaint, so long as it's of the form "I don't like this" and not "look what they subjected me to, those monsters".
      • margalabargala 7mo ago
        Just because you expect someone to owe something to you, doesn't mean they think they owe you that thing. If someone gives away something free, they can and sometimes do wash their hands of it. That doesn't prevent you from expressing your opinion on what you think they should change about the work, but they're not under any obligation to do anything about it. Someone made a thing available. You can take it as it is, you can make noise about what you don't like, you can make it better, or you can ignore it and move on. If someone is providing a mix of useful and garbage information, well, take your pick from the above.
• pyalwin 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• emptybits 7mo ago
  Aside from AI-proofing, IMO there is value in slow typing or writing. We have to think just a little bit more before putting ink to paper. There is also a higher cost to making mistakes. As a kid, before my family could afford a home computer, I was determined to do something that resembled programming. I borrowed "BASIC Computer Games" (1978) by David Ahl[1] from the library and typed in several programs on a manual Olympia typewriter. More than just reading code and maybe even more than being able to easily execute it, I'm convinced this typewriter exercise forced me to really study the flow and the how of the code. [1] https://archive.org/details/ahl-1978-basic-computer-games/ https://archive.org/details/ahl-1978-basic-computer-games/
• isolli 7mo ago
  Let me be blunt: the only reason I see not to implement solutions like this appears to be laziness from instructors.
• DeathArrow 7mo ago
  Why didn't she ask to write by hand?
  • mrweasel 7mo ago
    Because trying to read the handwriting of 100 students would take a lot of time?
• curun1r 7mo ago
  I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn how to do math without them, my school went the other way. They mandated that every student had one and then changed the assignments and tests to account for it. Gone were questions that had whole number answers that could be computed in our heads. Instead, answers were complex and the only way to know whether you'd done the question correctly was to be sure of your method. They even allowed us to write programs in TI-BASIC that we could use on tests, the only limitation was that we were not allowed to share programs with other students. I discovered that rather than trying to cram for exams, I could just write a program that would solve each class of problem we were likely to see on the exam, and by essentially teaching my calculator to pass the test, I also taught myself. It was a vastly better way for me to study. It also led to my decision to major in comp sci and my career in software. I'm forever grateful to those teachers for choosing to see the latest technology as a multiplier of student potential rather than a way students could cheat to avoid learning. So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI? These tools are not going to cease to exist. The students they are preparing are going to live and work in a world where they exist. To my mind, you best prepare students by teaching them how to use the tools most effectively, not by teaching them how to work without the tools. Students should be learning how to prompt AI without hinting it towards a specific answer. They should be learning how to double check the answers AI gives them to ferret out hallucinations. They should be learning how to produce work that is a hundred times more complex than what us older folks had to do in school. We should be graduating students who are so much more capable than any generation before them. I think we're doing them a disservice by trying to give them the same education that was given to those from previous generations. The world they will inhabit has changed radically from the one we entered into following school.
  • sdevonoes 7mo ago
    There’s one significant difference between: typewriters and calculators are a one-time-paymeny device. LLMs are subscription based baked by billionaire companies. That alone leaves LLMs in a bad enough place
• tim-projects 7mo ago
  To me this nostalgia is pointless. AI is here and it's good enough only going to get better. The classroom should be about using AI better not ignoring it. But that would require the teacher to be good at AI too. I think that's the problem here.
  • SirHumphrey 7mo ago
    Just because an AI can craft a decent Japanese text doesn’t mean I can. Just because AI can write x86 assembly also doesn’t mean I can. You don’t give first graders a calculator because they will always have one in their pocket- they end up just inputting numbers in a magic box and not learning how to do this manually which will destroy their future mathematical education. It’s about the same with AI.
    • tim-projects 7mo ago
      Here is a good video I watched just yesterday on how to integrate AI into a writing and thinking process. AI is not a gun that you can't put into the hands of a child. It's a paint brush. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbHB-rzKBAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbHB-rzKBAs
  • cafebabbe 7mo ago
    Seems like you're equating 'education' with 'employability training'.
  • medbar 7mo ago
    > The classroom should be about using AI better not ignoring it. No, it shouldn’t. I’m not bearish on AI but it shouldn’t replace any part of a classroom where the objective is to learn and communicate in a new language (German). The typewriter argument is memorable and interesting - the article points out the lack of editing forces kids to slow down and think about their writing, as well as iterate through multiple drafts. It’s not a nostalgia thing, they’re not old enough to have ever used one before. I could see an argument for adding on a new class for GenAI, agents, context engineering or what have you, but considering how behind current US curriculums already are and how quickly the AI field moves, I can only see this ending in wasted time and money: even an up to date class will be stale by the time it’s over. Kids will end up learning this anyway outside of the classroom, no use lecturing them on something they’ll already know.
• pftburger 7mo ago
  Would this be a good time to post about my AI controlled typewriter project?
  • zozbot234 7mo ago
    A computer controlled typewriter is a thing already. It's called a teletype (tty for short).
• cultofmetatron 7mo ago
  this just reinforced my recent belief that the best way to handle the AI boom is to pivot into robotics
• toonbit 7mo ago
  "You won't always have a calculator in your pocket"
  • oblio 7mo ago
    "Orders of magnitude".
• toonbit 7mo ago
  you won't always have a calculator in your pocket
  • pards 7mo ago
    Missing the /s? Most people have a calculator in their pocket all the time now. I remember having to split bar tabs by hand at the end of the night without a calculator. The waiter delivers a hand-written bill, and we'd calculate how much each person owed, splitting drinks individually and food equally, recalculating tax and tip to derive each person's total. We'd pool the cash in the middle of the table (with people taking their own change as they go where possible), then counting all the cash and making sure it still included sufficient tip. All after many pints. I do NOT miss those days.
• jfengel 7mo ago
  I can't compose at a typewriter the way I do with a word processor. I would have to write it out by hand first. If the typing is just transcription, I could just as well be copying from an AI doc. If you're doing it in class anyway, and providing typewriters, you might as well provide a locked down Chromebook. Cheaper and better for composition.
  • guerrilla 7mo ago
    I'm impressed how this comment covered all the bases. I would trust your code. haha
  • cvoss 7mo ago
    Writing an extemporaneous essay from start to finish in one draft on the spot is a skill that students were expected to develop in my educational experience in the US less than 15 years ago or so. If that's vanished, I'd be glad to see it come back.
    • tenacious_tuna 7mo ago
      > Writing an extemporaneous essay from start to finish in one draft Every English class I had in high school focused so strongly on how important revision was, or at a minimum having an outline to work from. While AP tests expected us to dash off essays by hand in a single go I empathize with OP around how useful a tool revision is.
• armchairhacker 7mo ago
  A typewriter is extreme. In school I used an AlphaSmart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart, because my handwriting sucked). A laptop without internet would also work.
  • tencentshill 7mo ago
    It's not hard to deploy laptops with all ports and networking disabled, its a BIOS option on most fleet systems.
• deadbabe 7mo ago
  If I was a professor, I would make a very clear policy they AI is not to be used on assignments, and would repeat it throughout the semester, but make no effort to actually enforce this and even make it easy to abuse. Then, for the final exam, drop the bomb: in person, handwritten, no outside references, mostly the same assignments we’ve done before. If you fail, it’s over for you. If you stayed true and studied, it should be easy for you to pass. If you used AI all semester, you did it to yourself. Those who complain will have their past assignments audited and if AI was used they are reported for plagiarism. This will be the most valuable lesson.
• tyingq 7mo ago
  I wonder if the daisy wheel printer market just ticked up on eBay.
• coffeefirst 7mo ago
  This line jumps out to me: > Everything slows down. It’s like back in the old days when you really did one thing at a time. Why did we turn computers into frenetic, distracted multitasking machines? What would it take to reverse course?
  • kristjansson 7mo ago
    > Why did we turn computers into frenetic, distracted multitasking machines? When we had to add another core to keep up with Moore’s Law?
• pseingatl 7mo ago
  If you need a typewriter, there's a company in New Jersey that makes them for the prison trade in a lucite housing to prevent prisoners from hiding contraband inside. Not sure if China manufactures new machines. India supposedly still manufactures them.
  • chambored 7mo ago
    Swintec
• s0rce 7mo ago
  In college I had to handwrite all my exams and the pure math courses didn't allow calculators. For the latter you could realize you were doing it wrong if the answer was too complicated to write down. As others said the final was something like 30% or more of your grade.
• alex_young 7mo ago
  Surely there's a middle ground? Get some old wordstar capable 86 class clones and leave the GUI off. It's typing on a keyboard without the confusion of the internet or clicking on glowing icons.
  • niek_pas 7mo ago
    Or just chromebooks with a web address blocklist.
• JoeJonathan 7mo ago
  A lot of people in this thread are talking about how they did in-person exams, handwritten problem sets in class, etc. This kind of thing is more challenging in the humanities, where the research paper is kind of our bread and butter. A lot of us have since turned to different kinds of assignments, but I am not ready to forego research papers in favor of blue book exams. I think there's some value in having to develop and sustain an argument in conversation with some body of literature (scholarly or otherwise), and that is not easily to replicate with in-person writing, at least at the undergrad level. (Doctoral candidates do this kind of thing all the time in qualifying exams, but that's after years of graduate school and fresh off doing nothing but reading 100+ books over the course of a few months.)
  • make3 7mo ago
    I'm not sure of if typewriters help for assignments. People will just rewrite what the AI wrote
    • jerf 7mo ago
      That's the first thing that happens. The next thing that happens is a befuddled "Ask HN: Why Do All The Daisy Wheel Printers On Ebay Suddenly Cost Thousands Of Dollars?". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing You can sometimes locally win an arms race by doing something really exotic that isn't worth the work to defeat, but this is definitely not a strategy that works if everyone adopts it.
  • joe_the_user 7mo ago
    It's easy to imagine a paper/exam combo. Student turn-in a mid-term paper. A professor chooses a certain number of points from the mid-term paper and asks for explanations of these in long-hand. Pulling questions this way doesn't seem like it would take more time than a thorough reading of the text. Oh, but paper reading has been delegated to a drudge you wouldn't trust with pulling question, oh how inconvenient. Which is to say the problems AI introduces to education are strongly related to much of work already being made mindless before AI appeared. Doctoral candidates do this kind of thing all the time in qualifying exams, but that's after years of graduate school and fresh off doing nothing but reading 100+ books over the course of a few months. No, High school students can do this. Well, they get impelled to do this. They can't do this now but that's a testament to current education.
• walrus01 7mo ago
  You could just as easily have a bunch of old desktop computers with no network interface uplink going out of the room active whatsoever, running some basic GUI and libreoffice, connected to nothing but a dumb copper ethernet switch in the same room and an old HP laserjet with a 10/100 ethernet interface in it. No need to force people to deal with typewriters.
• varispeed 7mo ago
  I hope they don't force people to walk to school, hunt for food and write in runes.
• nullbyte808 7mo ago
  May as well just used pencil and paper. They would have to learn to improve their penmanship too.
• rootusrootus 7mo ago
  I sometimes wonder if the next step for expensive, elite universities will be to make exam-by-interview a thing, even for undergraduate work. Get in a room with no electronics allowed, just you and the instructor/TA/whoever, and they interview you. Pretty quickly they are going to know if you learned the material or not.
• LoganDark 7mo ago
  > Most students found their pinkies weren’t strong enough to touch-type, so they typed more slowly, pecking at the keyboard with their index fingers. Huh. I'm not sure I ever use a pinky while touch-typing, except to hit right-backspace sometimes. For that matter I don't home using F and J either -- I usually home with alt+tab / cmd+tab and right-ctrl / right-cmd.
• LocalH 7mo ago
  Typewriters go a bit far, IMO. Give them a 5150 PC with WordStar and let them go to town.
• clove 7mo ago
  Anti-Dvorak instructor... I would do a 360 and walk right out of there. Ain't no way I'm re-learning QWERTY.
• 52h316g 7mo ago
  AI isn’t going anywhere, so blocking it with something like typewriters doesn’t really prepare students for reality. Feels better to design assignments where students have to use and think about AI, not avoid it. Good experiment, just not a long-term fix.
• casey2 7mo ago
  College education is all kinds of backwards if the goal was teaching students. If you aren't speaking day one of German find another teacher. In this case you are cheating yourself out of an education if you use a typewriter. We have amazing tools through screens, but insist on using them as if they were the old tools and act surprised when they lead to worse outcomes. Each student could easily have a friend in Germany they speak to in real time if people actually cared about breaking down cultural barriers. Schools have never cared about education, their main purpose is control. Control of the narrative and control over your life.
• Accountbar 7mo ago
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• tomasvojtech29 6mo ago
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