College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

Posted by gnabgib 8 hours ago

College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work(sentinelcolorado.com)

124 points | 131 commentspage 2

amingilani 2 hours ago|

A typewriter tty would be a fun weekend project.

fizlebit 4 hours 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.

WillAdams 2 hours ago||

A hand-written essay in class would seem to be a workable mechanism for a student to demonstrate an ability to reason on their own about a subject.

One of my best college professors would review such essays in-person, one-on-one twice each semester.

banana_sandwich 1 hour ago||

i mean, you can just have AI still do the work, you’re just doing data entry with a type writer.

opengrass 5 hours ago||

Better dust off that old AlphaSmart!

linsomniac 2 hours ago||

... and the price of daisywheel printers is skyrocketing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing

singpolyma3 5 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 5 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 4 hours ago||

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

janalsncm 4 hours 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.

paleotrope 5 hours ago|||

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

michaelt 4 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 5 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.

jubilanti 4 hours 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 5 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 5 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 5 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 4 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 :-)

dlivingston 2 hours ago||

I have an old MacBook Air I flashed with writerdeckOS [0]. Feels like a digital typewriter.

[0]: https://writerdeckos.com/

onesociety2022 6 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 5 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 5 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.

Peritract 3 hours ago|||

Gyms predate tractors.

llbbdd 2 hours ago||

3,000 years ago, physical labor was a component of most jobs. Today gyms are for people who can afford to attend them and don't have a day job that naturally exercises them through labor. People exercising purely for health benefits, and not because the strength benefits them in their job and in other facets of their life, is new.

cumshitpiss 4 hours ago|||

[dead]

onesociety2022 3 hours 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!).

Peritract 2 hours ago||

Gyms predate tractors by a couple of thousand years. You should think harder about the analogy.

ceejayoz 6 hours ago|||

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

echelon 5 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.

IshKebab 5 hours ago||

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

syngrog66 6 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

More comments...