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.)
> 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.
We made it. But, that’s survivorship bias, right? We can’t really know how much potential has wasted.
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.
You can very easily test CS concepts on paper, and programming is demonstrated via group projects.
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.
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.