College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

ggnabgib about 5 hours ago 73 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.

BobbyTables2•1 minute ago

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

nsyne•about 1 hour 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.

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•15 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.

ghighi7878•about 1 hour ago

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

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.

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•42 minutes 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.

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.

recursivedoubts•about 3 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.

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.

opengrass•about 2 hours ago

Better dust off that old AlphaSmart!

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

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.

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.

ceejayoz•about 3 hours ago

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

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

dyauspitr•about 2 hours ago

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

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 1 hour 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.

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).

rvz•about 2 hours ago

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