College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

ggnabgib about 5 hours ago 87 commentsRead Article on sentinelcolorado.com

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throwatdem12311•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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.

syntaxing•about 1 hour ago

I went to college as a MechE so unsure if compsci was different. But overall, all the “fun” projects were labs. We have three semesters of hell and all 3 semesters had 2-3 labs, and we write 20 pages or so for EACH lab a week (usually a team of 2-3).

gpm•about 1 hour 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.

jason_zig•6 minutes ago

is evaluation that important? ultimately if you can't do the work you're only cheating yourself in the long run...

lokar•about 1 hour 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.

fma•about 1 hour ago

Then I suppose we can go back to having computer labs that can only access white listed domains and other study materials. Students code there to ensure no cheating.

zdragnar•23 minutes ago

The labs I was in weren't connected to the Internet at all, only a local intranet. Though, they were all running pre-oracle solaris if memory serves, so I'm probably dating myself a bit.

BobbyTables2•8 minutes ago

Today just teachers walking around during an exam instead of browsing on their phone would do wonders…

ghighi7878•about 1 hour ago

Writing programs by hand is something I had to do too. Compete waste of time

whartung•about 3 hours 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•about 3 hours ago

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

ssl-3•about 1 hour 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-baf3-6af41fe577...

vunderba•about 2 hours ago

Even Microsoft Word stores revision history inside .docx files, and that’s been used to expose plagiarism. I heard about one case where a student took an existing paper (I believe from a previous year/student) and pasted it into Word. They then edited it just enough to make it look different.

However, they didn’t remove the embedded revision history in the .docx file they submitted, so that went about as well as you can expect.

eichin•about 2 hours ago

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•about 2 hours ago

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

tejtm•about 2 hours 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.

vunderba•about 2 hours ago

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•about 2 hours ago

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

RhysabOweyn•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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.

phoronixrly•about 1 hour ago

Did you by any chance graduate before the COVID-19 pandemic?

bmitc•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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

beej71•about 1 hour ago

I'd like to see some data on this. My general-ed recall is minimal, and in programming before school, I certainly learned a ton more by coding than by testing. That's my perception of my time in school, as well.

bmitc•about 1 hour 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.

recursivedoubts•about 4 hours 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•about 3 hours 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•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours 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.

dublinstats•about 1 hour 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

zamadatix•about 2 hours 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.

simpaticoder•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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.

acbart•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour ago

My quizzes are written responses, psuedocode and annotating code.

blharr•20 minutes 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

api•about 2 hours ago

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

fizlebit•about 1 hour 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.

Swizec•about 3 hours 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•about 3 hours ago

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

Swizec•about 1 hour 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.

jubilanti•about 1 hour ago

Moreso than a job interview?

opengrass•about 2 hours ago

Better dust off that old AlphaSmart!

SilentM68•19 minutes 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.

singpolyma3•about 2 hours 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.

eszed•about 2 hours 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.

bmitc•about 1 hour ago

The fact that it's an industry is alone enough to cry.

paleotrope•about 2 hours ago

Well from a certain perspective they are also hurting the schools reputation, the programs reputation, and ultimately their fellow students.

michaelt•about 2 hours ago

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.

mcmcmc•about 2 hours 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.

janalsncm•about 1 hour ago

> If students cheat they hurt only themselves

This statement is more defensible after removing “only”. If it “only” hurt the cheaters, there would be no need to police cheating at all.

jubilanti•about 1 hour ago

They hurt other students who worked hard for the degree. They hurt the reputation of the school and the utility of the degree as a credential.

delusional•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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.

gentleman11•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours 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 :-)

onesociety2022•about 3 hours 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.

Peritract•about 2 hours ago

The goal of the educational process isn't the test paper, it's the learning.

Gyms aren't redundant because tractors exist.

llbbdd•about 2 hours 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.

onesociety2022•31 minutes ago

Huh? The gym analogy doesn’t even make sense. People didn’t go to gyms when they were farming with oxen. Gyms are popular now precisely because tractors exist and you don’t need manual labor to farm anymore but people still need the physical exercise for their health. Society has adapted to the arrival of new life-changing technology. Our education system needs to adapt to new technology like AI too. You can probably uplevel a lot of courses and cover a lot more interesting topics than before and teach real application of things you learned aided by AI. Just like when I was doing a CS major 20 years ago, they didn’t spend too much time teaching me assembly programming beyond 1 or 2 lectures (they let me use a compiler for programming assignments!).

ceejayoz•about 3 hours ago

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

IshKebab•about 2 hours ago

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

echelon•about 3 hours ago

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.

syngrog66•about 3 hours 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

gorgoiler•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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.

pbgcp2026•about 1 hour ago

... meanwhile, all these students graduate, can't find jobs and become plumbers or bricklayers.

dyauspitr•about 2 hours ago

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

arcfour•about 2 hours ago

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

CalChris•about 3 hours ago

Next up: allow slide rules on exams.

teeray•about 3 hours ago

Were they ever banned?

bombcar•about 3 hours ago

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

vunderba•about 2 hours 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).

rvz•about 2 hours ago

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

llbbdd•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours ago

> College is about learning how to work in an industry.

llbbdd•about 1 hour 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.