[HN Gopher] College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-w...
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College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
Author : gnabgib
Score : 80 points
Date : 2026-04-18 19:00 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sentinelcolorado.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sentinelcolorado.com)
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...)
| simpaticoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| acbart wrote:
| 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.
| dublinstats wrote:
| 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
| api wrote:
| The last point is very interesting and might keep universities
| relevant.
| acbart wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My quizzes are written responses, psuedocode and annotating
| code.
| CalChris wrote:
| Next up: allow slide rules on exams.
| teeray wrote:
| Were they ever banned?
| bombcar wrote:
| Probably around the time they were invented. They were
| mandatory on my ground exam (private pilot).
| vunderba wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| vunderba wrote:
| 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.
| Swizec wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This sounds extremely susceptible to unconscious bias, or even
| just straightforward discrimination.
| Swizec wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Moreso than a job interview?
| syngrog66 wrote:
| 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
| onesociety2022 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There are plenty of things AI can do that students still
| benefit from learning.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| This is like saying you shouldn't learn to add because we have
| calculators.
| Peritract wrote:
| The goal of the educational process isn't the test paper, it's
| the learning.
|
| Gyms aren't redundant because tractors exist.
| llbbdd wrote:
| 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.
| whartung wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Typing as a service is a whole cottage industry on Etsy.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| 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...
| tejtm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wow it feels like the Loebner prize went away right at the
| dawn of the LLM. Is it correlated?
| vunderba wrote:
| Yeah I definitely think LLMs contributed to its demise.
| To be honest, nobody in academic AI circles took it very
| seriously, because it kind of devolved into a contest
| over who could create the most convincing _illusion of
| intelligence_.
|
| Participants spent more time polishing up the natural
| language parsing aspects in conjunction with pre-
| programming elaborate backstories for their chatbot's
| bios among other psychological tricks. In the end, the
| whole competition was more impressive as a social
| engineering exercise, since the real goal kinda became:
| how can I trick people into thinking my chatbot is a
| human?
|
| But reading through some of the previous competition
| chatbot transcripts still makes for fascinating reading.
| vunderba wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| In general I love the idea of turning printers into
| typewriters. I've been thinking about how to do it with an
| inkjet printer.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :-)
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| 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.
| delusional wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| paleotrope wrote:
| Well from a certain perspective they are also hurting the
| schools reputation, the programs reputation, and ultimately
| their fellow students.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| 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.
| eszed wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The fact that it's an industry is alone enough to cry.
| michaelt wrote:
| 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| The college instructor might as well ban calculators and use
| abacuses then.
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gpm wrote:
| 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.
| syntaxing wrote:
| 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).
| fma wrote:
| 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.
| ghighi7878 wrote:
| Writing programs by hand is something I had to do too. Compete
| waste of time
| llbbdd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > College is about learning how to work in an industry.
|
| Oh
| arcfour wrote:
| Pfft, just grab a teletype and run lpr -P ttyUSB0
| ai_generated_report.txt ;-)
| RhysabOweyn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bmitc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| bmitc wrote:
| 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.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Did you by any chance graduate before the COVID-19 pandemic?
| opengrass wrote:
| Better dust off that old AlphaSmart!
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Just have them write it out. "Ain't nobody got a goddamn
| typewriter".
| fizlebit wrote:
| 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.
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