Discussion

A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons

CalChris: Next up: allow slide rules on exams.

recursivedoubts: 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.

teeray: Were they ever banned?

zamadatix: 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 work people were graded on couldn't be fudged...

syngrog66: 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

Swizec: 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

onesociety2022: 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: There are plenty of things AI can do that students still benefit from learning.

bombcar: Probably around the time they were invented. They were mandatory on my ground exam (private pilot).

whartung: 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: Typing as a service is a whole cottage industry on Etsy.

mjlee: This sounds extremely susceptible to unconscious bias, or even just straightforward discrimination.

bee_rider: 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.

gentleman11: 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 oftenImagine 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

gorgoiler: [delayed]

singpolyma3: 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.

echelon: Maybe instead of trying to teach around the abacus, we need to teach the higher level things you can reach with MATLAB.We're doing these students a major disservice making them live in the old world. It's our fault for being inflexible, but their world is going to be wholly different and we should just embrace that.

simpaticoder: 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.

Peritract: The goal of the educational process isn't the test paper, it's the learning.Gyms aren't redundant because tractors exist.

IshKebab: This is like saying you shouldn't learn to add because we have calculators.

eszed: 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.

acbart: 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.

throwatdem12311: 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.

rvz: The college instructor might as well ban calculators and use abacuses then.

api: The last point is very interesting and might keep universities relevant.

acbart: 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.

vunderba: 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: 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".

llbbdd: 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.

RhysabOweyn: 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.

arcfour: Pfft, just grab a teletype and run lpr -P ttyUSB0 ai_generated_report.txt ;-)

opengrass: Better dust off that old AlphaSmart!

vunderba: 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.

nsyne: 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.

PebblesRox: 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.

michaelt: The thing is, when colleges don't test students' ability properly before issuing a credential, employers start testing job applicants' ability after they've received it.And they'll do it with all the 'unnecessarily high stakes' and 'risk of unconscious bias' and 'not truly representative' problems that written exams have; and a bunch of extra problems too.

deepsun: 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: 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...)

tejtm: 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.

vunderba: You should look up the history of the Loebner Prize [1]. There’s a shocking amount of technological development in some chatbots that went toward simulating mistakes and typing patterns to make them seem more human-like.In some of the later Loebner competitions, when text was transmitted to the human character by character, the bot would even simulate typos followed by backspacing on screen to make it look more realistic.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize

djmips: Wow it feels like the Loebner prize went away right at the dawn of the LLM. Is it correlated?

dyauspitr: Just have them write it out. “Ain’t nobody got a goddamn typewriter”.

dublinstats: 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.

eichin: Hmm, I have some old daisy-wheel printers in the closet that I've been meaning to strip down for stepper motors, maybe I should refurb them instead :-)

djmips: In general I love the idea of turning printers into typewriters. I've been thinking about how to do it with an inkjet printer.