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I’m 30 and “we can’t do tests in paper” seems _insane_. Just how metastatic has ed tech been in what, 9 years since my undergrad?
by QuadmasterXLII 3mo ago
I’m 30 and “we can’t do tests in paper” seems _insane_. Just how metastatic has ed tech been in what, 9 years since my undergrad?
- ant6n 3mo 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 3mo agoBecause students aren’t AI and aren’t measured by tokens/s
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- dzink 3mo agoFill the room with typewriters.
- walrus01 3mo 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 3mo agoYou cant type fast on them either
- robocat 3mo 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.
- redsocksfan45 3mo ago[dead]
- dzink 3mo agoIf I build you a custom device that receives questions from a central computer and lets the user plug in whatever keyboard they want via bluetooth or usb to only type and answer the questions (ability to edit the text and submit when ready). The central computer can receive all the questions submitted to any of these devices connected to it via wifi or cloud. How much would pay per device? Would you pay for a subscription?
- walrus01 3mo agoI think this can already be implemented through a fairly mundane thin client approach, such as Dell/Wyse type thin clients, citrix stuff, or an ordinary x86-64 desktop PC setup with an absolute barebones OS that connects a graphical desktop session to something centralized over a LAN.
- dzink 3mo agoOr you can do a much cheaper tiny esp32 typewriter with a basic display and a usb for a keyboard. But who wants cheap for education.
- fn-mote 3mo agoFrankly, the problem is finding someone with the knowledge to administer it. Initial cost is almost certainly not a factor; the components could be so old as to be free.
- hoppyhoppy2 3mo agoManual typewriters are no longer being manufactured. Several brands of electric and electronic typewriters are still are being made.
- cesarb 3mo ago> Fill the room with typewriters. 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).
- wtrwqyw 3mo agoElectric typewriters were pretty widespread by the 60-70s or so it’s just that they don’t have quite as much “retro” appeal these days ( eg like cassettes vs vinyl)
- cesarb 3mo agoI saw plenty of mechanical typewriters by the 80s/90s, when I learned typing at school. A relative of mine also taught a typewriter course, with several different mechanical typewriter models. Everyone I know who had a typewriter had a mechanical one. I don't think I've ever seen an electric typewriter in person; I've only read about them in the Internet. They don't seem to have been that widespread to me.
- forgetfreeman 3mo agoI'm 50. Optimizing testing for speed is goofy. The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the student's understanding of the material, not their WPM.
- xp84 3mo agoSure but given any length of time, which does tend to be finitely allocated for a test (if for no other reason than the prof or proctor does have other places to be eventually), having to hand write is slower and harder to revise, which means it's harder to get that full, understanding-demonstrating essay, done and polished.
- dwattttt 3mo agoIf your test is bottlenecked on the speed it takes to write it, you're testing writing skills. I also challenge that "hand writing is harder to revise"; again, why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?
- xp84 3mo ago> challenge "hand writing is harder to revise" What? Suppose you want to fix the opening of your essay. Best case it's pencil and you can erase some, but worst case you have a longer sentence you want to put in there so you can't do it without scribbling all over and making a mess of the page. Word processors let you edit. How is this controversial? > why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant? Okay, so from first principles: 1. Time is finite, we will all perish 2. Unless you are doing open book, needs to be supervised (proctored / or prof/TA is there) 3. That person is paid for a shift 4. That shift must end 5. Therefore, anything that enables people to write faster is good for the students, who can get more paper written, or the paper better revised, during the finite time available for writing.
- 1123581321 3mo agoIt’s fine to erase or use scratch paper on an essay test. 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.
- ThrowawayR2 3mo agoA lecture hall full of click-click-click isn't going to be conducive to concentrating on a test.
- kalium-xyz 3mo agoI had tons of exams like that. Its not an issue as the computers simply do not have loud mechanical keyboards connected
- rsanek 3mo agoIf you can't concentrate while people are working on computers near you, I don't think you'll do well in any workplace that is based around knowledge work.
- anigbrowl 3mo agoThis is why I prefer working alone at night and am massively more productive. In any case, what's being tested in an exam setting is one's understanding of the course material, not whether they are a good fit for your idea of a normal workplace.
- duskdozer 3mo agoWe're no longer limited by this and can avoid the productivity drag by universally permitting remote work.
- bjackman 3mo ago... Including a university. Literally everywhere you work as a student is serenaded by keyboard sounds.
- account42 3mo agoNot every company is an open office hellscape.
- eviks 3mo agoChange the keyboards to silent. Allow headphones. Still beats the collective waste of forcing to hand write
- yulker 3mo agobecause writing speed isn't the bottleneck for what is being tested
- z0ltan 3mo ago[dead]
- account42 3mo agoIf the writing part is anywhere close to being a bottleneck then the exam is just too easy.
- rtpg 3mo agoI had to do "write code on paper" stuff as part of french engineering school entrance exams. It's fine (tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"), but it limits what kinds of problems you can reasonably put on the exam. You'll definitely lean a bit more into theoretical stuff than practicals. Which is fine for some courses, I think a bit less interesting in other courses. Remember, the hand written code is also harder for reviewers to grade! You have to manually run the code in your head, for example Having said all that... "we've booked the computer room, you don't have internet, go type up all your stuff in this VM we have set up" feels fine if you don't like this constraint IMO
- fn-mote 3mo ago> we've booked the computer room, you don't have internet 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.)
- rtpg 3mo ago2 is “fine”, or that’s just the status quo. The friction from copying over stuff from a tiny phone screen discretely is the cost to cheat as well 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
- cholmdomsky 3mo agoJfc, this is a solved problem at the community college near me. All of the computers in the testing room are thin clients that effectively remote into a vm, and you get checked with a metal detector before going into the room with the computers. If you can escape the vm on the fly and manage to use an llm to cheat, you deserve that A.
- SkiFire13 3mo agoI graduated from a not so incredible university and we had multiple such rooms. Teaching assistants and some tutors helped supervising the exams and it wasn't easy to cheat without getting caught.
- walrus01 3mo agoI'm quite a bit older than you, old enough that I remember learning to touch type in elementary school on Apple IIe and IIgs desktop computers. It's not reasonable these days to expect people to hand write a 4, 6, 8 page length essay on paper and pen with a finite time limit in a classroom. Being able to edit and revise things in a word processor type interface is an essential part of writing an academic paper. Additionally expecting whoever is reading the paper to comprehend everyone's (likely very sloppy, in this era) handwriting is an exercise in frustration for the person who would be evaluating the papers. Not that tests/exams can't be given on paper, ever (multiple choice still works), but for something where people are expected to provide multiple pages of coherently written essay output, I would struggle to do it by hand. And I'm old enough that we did do a lot purely on paper when I was in school.
- __d 3mo agoMy child's high school is doing the same thing: all exams are now handwritten on paper in a supervised room. Phones and smartwatches are always banned during the school day, but laptops are banned during exams. This is standard at state-funded high schools in Australia. There will likely be a period where those who went through high school with computers struggle with hand writing stuff, but the next generation will have done it all their lives.
- throwaway152321 3mo ago> I would struggle to do it by hand. 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. :)
- kevin_thibedeau 3mo ago> Cursive makes it much easier on the hand and wrist. For righties.
- supertroop 3mo agoI’m 57. It is insane to hear this bullshit.
- ValentinPearce 3mo agoI've sat exams a few years after university (for a tentative career change) and I can tell you I'd forgotten how genuinely tiring writing so much by hand was. I've made sure to write more regularly since, just in case I change from software engineering to something that requires more handwriting.
- bjackman 3mo agoWell, how many times in that 9 years have you written on paper for 2 hours straight? Even as a kid who did it regularly, it sucked. 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.
- doodpants 3mo ago> Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text. Pen and paper are literally designed to produce text.
- bjackman 3mo agoHorse carts are literally designed to transport people but they aren't very good at it compared to cars
- tedd4u 3mo ago> Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text Can you say more? It's worked well for 4,500 years. Probably the most important invention ever.
- wtrwqyw 3mo agoWell to be fair humans had to suffer through all kinds of miserable practices over those years. Modern style of writing as we understand it didn’t really develop until the 800s or so (if not way later). 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?
- bjackman 3mo agoNo? Some subsets of the world has papyrus I guess but for most people during most of that time people were pressing text into clay and wax and stuff, it must have fucking sucked. 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.
- xhkkffbf 3mo agoI'm much older. I've always been able to type faster than I can write by hand. Forcing me to handwrite an answer slows me down -- and produces something that's much harder to read.