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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

I'm not that old, and yet my university CS courses evaluated people with group projects, and in-person paper exams. We weren't allowed to bring computers or calculators into the exam room (or at least, not any calculators with programming or memory). It was fine.

I don't see why this is so hard, other than the usual intergenerational whining / a heaping pile of student entitlement.

If anything, the classes that required extensive paper-writing for evaluation are the ones that seem to be in trouble to me. I guess we're back to oral exams and blue books for those, but again...worked fine for prior generations.

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> and in-person paper exams.

Yup. ~25 years ago competitions / NOI / leet_coding as they call it now were in a proctored room, computers with no internet access, just plain old borland c, a few problems and 3h of typing. All the uni exams were pen & paper. C++ OOP on paper was fun, but iirc the scoring was pretty lax (i.e. minor typos were usually ignored).

> I don't see why this is so hard, other than the usual intergenerational whining / a heaping pile of student entitlement.

You know that grading paper exams is a lot more hassle _for the teachers_?

Your overall point might or might not still stand. I'm just responding to your 'I don't see why this is so hard'. Show some imagination for why other people hold their positions.

(I'm sure there's lots of other factors that come into play that I am not thinking of here.)

...and yet, somehow we managed?

> Show some imagination for why other people hold their positions.

I say that as someone who has also graded piles of paper exams in graduate school (also not that long ago!)

I don't believe the argument you are making is true, but if the primary objection really is that teachers have to grade, then no, I don't have any sympathy.

It sorta depends on the material… I always thought paper programming tests were dumb: when I was taking them and when I was proctoring/grading them. It is not that similar to writing a program in an IDE where it will tell you if you make a little mistake, and often help you work your way through it.

We made it. But, that’s survivorship bias, right? We can’t really know how much potential has wasted.

Hear, hear!

Doing programming on paper seems to me like assessing someone's skills in acrobatics by watching them do the motions in a zero-gravity environment. Without the affordances given by the computer, it's just not the same activity.

Computer science, the academic discipline, is to programming as mechanics is to bowling.

You can very easily test CS concepts on paper, and programming is demonstrated via group projects.

Absolutely. It makes good sense to describe algorithms on paper via pseudo-code and diagrams, but they shouldn't be expected to write working code on paper.

I kinda had this sentiment until I actually started working - quite often an issue only manifests at an obscure customer system or is a race condition that it too rare to catch reliably, yet happens often enough so you can't just ignore it.

To solve those in a reasonable amount of time, you need to form a mental model of what is going on & how to fix it. Having access to a computer by itself won't really help for those.

In that context paper exams for computer science make much more sense to me now - they want you to understand the problem and provide a solution, with pen and paper being the output format.

> ...and yet, somehow we managed?

People in the past put up with all kinds of struggles. They had to.

> I don't believe the argument you are making is true, but if the primary objection really is that teachers have to grade, then no, I don't have any sympathy.

I have no clue what the primary objection really is. I was responding to "I don't see why this is so hard", which just shows a lack of imagination.

You’re making it seem those guys worked the fields 14 hours straight. It’s just some paperwork..

Why can't the teachers use LLMs to grade?

Ah, the eternal dream of offloading all human labor to machines. Why can't teachers just let an LLM grade? Because, of course, nothing says "educational integrity" like a glorified autocomplete deciding whether little Timmy's essay on Shakespeare adequately captures the existential dread of Hamlet. Sure, let's trust a model that hallucinates citations. But fine, if we're really committed to stripping all nuance from education, why stop there? Let's just plug students into Anki's FSRS algorithm and call it a day. Just assign grades based on how fast their retention decays, because nothing says "holistic assessment" like reducing a human being to a set of coefficients in a spaced repetition formula. Never mind that actual learning involves things like critical thinking or, heaven forbid, creativity. No, no, we'll just reduce the entire process to a forgetting curve. Because nothing inspires a love of knowledge like treating human minds as poorly optimized flashcard decks, mechanically processed and discarded the moment their retention scores dip below acceptable thresholds.

In general – why I'd put my effort into visiting (and paying for) a school and learning in such case? That's not what schools are for. I can get any amount of grades I want from LLM myself.

Grading is already mechanical, it's just a human does it. I'm not sure what you're objecting to here.

Might be interesting. You can at least use modern AI to turn scans of hand-scrawled-on paper into something readable.

Thing is, this hits the scaling problem in education and fucking hard.

There’s such a shortfall of teachers globally, and the role is a public good, so it’s constantly underpaid.

And if you are good - why would you teach ? You’d get paid to just take advantage of your skills.

And now we have a tool that makes it impossible to know if you have taught anyone because they can pass your exams.

I'm not too old either and in my university, CS was my major, we did group projects and in person paper exams as well.

We wrote c++ on paper for some questions and were graded on it. Ofcourse the tutors were lenient on the syntax they cared about the algorithm and the data structures not so much for the code. They did test syntax knowledge as well but more in code reasoning segments, i.e questions like what's the value of a after these two statements or after this loop is run.

We also had exams in the lab with computers disconnected from the internet. I don't remember the details of the grading but essentially the teaching team was in the room and pretty much scored us then and there.

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