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> In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written. Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms
by walrus01 4mo ago
> In the AI era, tests are going to have to be in person and hand written.
Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and libreoffice writer as a basic word processor.
Let people at least type their essay with the standard features of a word processor as usable as MS Word 2000 or better.
- BaculumMeumEst 4mo agoNobody is going to do that.
- walrus01 4mo agoWhy not?
- sokoloff 4mo agoDo you let students bring their own keyboards? If not, does that disadvantage a Dvorak user? Or a Kinesis user? Or a non-US layout? Or a Mac user? If you do let them bring their own keyboards, how sure are you that those are just dumb keyboards?
- walrus01 4mo agoI would bet good money, statistically, that forcing hand written tests with pen and paper is much more likely to disadvantage students with a medically documented physical disability than you are to encounter someone who can't type at all on a standard 101 key qwerty layout keyboard.
- vcf 4mo agoAt my university, students with verified disabilities are allowed to use a university-provided laptop (properly locked-down, with allowed tools such as screen readers). But these are special cases. Computers for everyone would be costly and impractical given exams are punctual but all roughly over the same week or so.
- recursivedoubts 4mo agoMore expensive than you'd think, but I am pushing for something like that.
- 1659447091 4mo ago> More expensive than you'd think 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-educational-access-platform/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/leap-low-bandwidth-educatio... [1] https://github.com/T4EQ/leap https://github.com/T4EQ/leap
- recursivedoubts 4mo agoless the hardware (although that is still expensive at scale) and more the management, physical space and maintenance.
- wnevets 4mo agoCan you fit a decent LLM on a thumbdrive?
- Avicebron 4mo agoProbably safer to use typewriters.
- walrus01 4mo agoLots of ways to disable USB ports in bios and at the operating system level, additionally have a proctor watching to be sure everyone is in a word processor. Heck, ewaste grade computers can run a basic word processor, fill all USB ports except the mouse and keyboard with epoxy. Mount the computer in such a way the rear ports are inaccessible without it being very obvious what someone is doing and fill just the front ports (if they exist) with epoxy. Lots of ways to go about it.
- bryanlarsen 4mo agoA proctored exam doesn't need to have perfect lock-down. The proctor should notice the thumb-drive. They might miss it, but the risk will deter most.
- bagels 4mo agoIt can fit on augmented reality glasses, eventually.
- walrus01 4mo agoPretty sure that augmented reality glasses, and things in the category of the meta glasses with built-in camera are already banned in most academic test environments, by a blanket policy prohibiting the use of any camera in the room.
- bagels 4mo agoRight, they're easy to detect today, that's not going to last long. The whole point is to prevent cheating, well, cheats aren't going to follow the rules. Written tests/in person tests aren't a complete answer to this.
- QuadmasterXLII 4mo agoI’m 30 and “we can’t do tests in paper” seems _insane_. Just how metastatic has ed tech been in what, 9 years since my undergrad?
- ant6n 4mo agoI’m 40 and forcing students to do handwritten essays during tests has always been stupid. Typing is much faster, why bottleneck ideas by forcing handwriting?
- aetch 4mo agoBecause students aren’t AI and aren’t measured by tokens/s
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- dzink 4mo agoFill the room with typewriters.
- walrus01 4mo agoTypewriters are an expensive and niche item these days, due to no longer being manufactured, and the good ones being collected by weird nerds. Sort of like buying a 40-year-old vinyl turntable that is in good and usable condition.
- kalium-xyz 4mo agoYou cant type fast on them either
- robocat 4mo agoYou mean on mechanical typewriters? It would be hard to learn to press keys slowly and avoid rollover unless using single finger typing: key travel was a long way on old typewriters.
- tiahura 4mo agoWhat's wrong with https://www.scantron.com/ https://www.scantron.com/?
- Arainach 4mo agoFor nearly any subject of learning at a level above high school, multiple choice is a terrible way to assess knowledge. Multiple choice can only tell if you reached a final answer (or guessed it). It cannot tell anything about how you reached that conclusion.
- userbinator 4mo agoHowever, it is a fast and simple method of assessment.
- Arainach 4mo agoMeasuring what is easy to measure instead of what actually matters is a classic fallacy.
- userbinator 4mo agoIt's a good first step, a pre-filter to more demanding questions.
- Arainach 4mo agoThere's no such thing as "filtering" in academics. You don't get to kick out the students who didn't do well on the multiple choice and only proceed with the ones who scored highly.
- criddell 4mo agoI had classes in school that had multiple-choice quizzes every couple of weeks. It helped students figure out if they knew the material just covered and it helped the prof know how well he did teaching. They acted as checkpoints. The mid-term and final exams were not multiple choice (at least not entirely).
- paul7986 4mo agoThere should be no computer at all just give students a typewriter. It could prompt a resurgence of the typewriter :)
- loloquwowndueo 4mo agoThese days pretty sure computers are cheaper than typewriters.
- walrus01 4mo agoComputers good enough to run libreoffice writer or the equivalent and print to a networked laser are thrown in the ewaste trash all the time, the cost really would be in the labor and somewhat custom software setup. Could also reuse old flat panel displays that have been decommissioned from office use.
- loloquwowndueo 4mo agoLubing typewriters and ensuring they have a fresh ribbon also sounds pretty labor intensive. (Where do you even get ribbons these days)
- shagie 4mo agoYou can get a manual typewriter (hammer rather than ball) on Amazon for about $200. Brand name ones run in the $300 - $400 range. A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons - https://apnews.com/article/typewriter-ai-cheating-chatgpt-cornell-ce10e1ca0f10c96f79b7d988bb56448b https://apnews.com/article/typewriter-ai-cheating-chatgpt-co...
- customguy 4mo ago> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now I'm even more radical. It's like PE or brushing your teeth. Nobody initially wants it, so we, knowing better, force them.
- metalcrow 4mo agoWhat's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?
- cataphract 4mo agoWhat is "standard writing"? Isn't cursive the standard you're taught and then everyone writes however they want?
- encomiast 4mo agoWhen I was in school we started with "manuscript" writing, which is detached letters similar to a typical sans-serif typeface without the two-story `a` and other fanciness. We then progressed to cursive.
- Arainach 4mo agoNo. Most people handwrite most things in print lettering, not cursive. I'm nearly 40 and no one in my life writes anything other than their name (signature) in cursive ever.
- bloqs 4mo agoThis is not true outside of the United States
- 4mo ago
- dekdrop 4mo agohow do you make sure they are not using their mobile phone with llms while the exam? I have seen that happening.
- walrus01 4mo agoThe same method that any test given in the last 150 years has done to prevent people from using cheat sheets or similar, by having roaming proctors in the room? Or policies like certain models of HP or TI graphing calculator only allowed on the table, for the sort of test that requires one...
- WalterBright 4mo agoSomehow I got through high school and 4 years of every class being a math class in college without a graphing calculator.
- account42 4mo agoI have had a couple exams in university where it was explicitly allowed to bring a (handwritten) A4 cheat sheet. Depends what you are testing though - understanding or memorization.
- jasondigitized 4mo agoSeems like a problem an entrepreneur / technologist can easily solve.
- pianopatrick 4mo agoIf people wanted to get really serious you could use a cell phone jammer and have students pass through a mini EMP at the door.
- account42 4mo agoThat's like preventing crime by locking everyone up. Much easier is to just have someone with authority in the room to hand out consequences to those who break the rules.
- tialaramex 4mo agoIt would also be a huge discrimination problem. I (as part of a small team) run the IT side of exams for a UK University and as well as the many exams intended to be taken entirely with computers, we also deliberately have an exam that's always marked as "Available to take" regardless of where on campus you are and what machine you're using, that exam just launches a stripped down Microsoft Word, with no way to start other software or access your own data. So instead of reading the instruction book and writing either in the book or on separate provided paper, you read the book and type your answers in Word, when you're done either your work is printed or these days often it's automatically sent to the markers electronically. There's a spectrum of people using this, going from the profoundly blind who couldn't have attempted an actual hand written exam through to people who have dyslexia or similar problems and would be able to write but it might be very difficult to mark. It also becomes a "last ditch fallback" for a number of scenarios where plans went wrong or something was forgotten and so that's why it's always available - we do run exams specifically planned to be in Word, but those have distinct IDs so that you know you're taking the exam "HIST1234/C4 History of Clowns and Clowning. Essay on prepared topic" or whatever, as well as "Multiple choice" style exams, and a large number of exams which involve using computer tooling, e.g. R, Stats packages, programming.
- jyounker 4mo agoAccommodations for those who have problems with writing has been a thing for a long time. 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.
- tialaramex 4mo ago> Accommodations for those who have problems with writing has been a thing for a long time. 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?
- freehorse 4mo agoTalking about programming-related courses, I can see the point of testing on a computer where one can run and debug actual code (that's how I had my programming courses) but I am not sure I get the advantage or writing code or pseudocode on a "basic word processor". Moreover, for math or math-heavy courses (assuming most people with degrees here have STEM degrees, and many with at least some math) I cannot imagine how to comfortably write math in a word processor. Or use latex and not spend half the time troubleshooting latex, esp without internet access. So for some kind of courses at least, imo pen and paper for a timed in-person exam is the only way. Otherwise def doable, but knowing how some universities function, I think the main problem would be getting the agreement and initiative to set such a computer room up. Getting some kind of consensus between professors that this is how (some) exams should be held and including it in the Holy Curriculum. Getting bureaucrats understand what it is about eg why you need these wired connections when the uni has a campus-wide wifi. Getting IT security agree with using old computers with lubuntu instead of their bloated enterprise windows "secure" OS. And if they are not connected to the internet how will they get security updates? How do we conform to whatever IT security rules are in place? Writing on paper is much simpler, everybody can understand it and has been standard for decades at least. It can start tomorrow and be used in the interim while waiting approval for such a computer setup.
- fn-mote 4mo agoWriting on paper requires higher level planning skills. A word processor allows you to edit, which is a major part of the writing process. Forcing learners to plan everything “perfectly” before they write is a big ask. And you’re probably not teaching that skill. I remember how much my technical writing skills improved once I started writing in a computer and editing. It was a huge difference.
- wombatpm 4mo agoPhysics 107 at U of I in the 80’s had all quizzes on the PLATO system. Please for the love of mercy do not not go back to inflexible systems for exams and quizzes.
- Bawoosette 4mo agoWhen I started university, it did indeed have a dedicated building that was essentially a computer lab specifically for testing. In theory, cheating was prevented by having people walk around the lab watching the students. Toward the end, I did have a couple exams that needed the absolutely batshit insane malware installed on a personal device, but I think if I were to do it again today, I could still demand to use the testing center instead. It still exists.
- zaptheimpaler 4mo agoWith all the work around AI sandboxes, microVMs, browser sandboxes, device attestation, secure boot etc. I feel like we should be able to construct a proper software sandbox that works on most PCs and guarantees that e.g nothing outside of the word processor runs now. Like the OS would need to guarantee that nothing outside some narrow well-defined qemu VM runs for some time an the VM takes care of the rest.
- nunez 4mo agoMany schools have proctored and internet-restricted testing centers. They are mostly for students with IEPs though.
- cyberax 4mo agoWhy? If a person can't hand-write an essay for an exam, then they're under-educated.
- internet_points 4mo ago(It's mentioned as an idea in the bottom part of the htmx.org essay)
- Angostura 4mo agoIn the UK the majority of exams are in person and on paper. Doesn’t seem to be a particular problem
- robertlagrant 4mo ago> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. It would be very cheap in terms of old computing hardware to set up a test room with old desktop PCs that have wired only NICs (with a network connection that goes to a switch in the same room with no uplink, connected to a decent size laser printer only), running something like lubuntu and libreoffice writer as a basic word processor. 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.