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Comment by yazantapuz | Hacker News Reader

I teach on a small university. These are some of the measures we take:

- Hand written midterms and exams.

- The students should explain how they designed and how they coded their solutions to programming exercises (we have 15-20 students per class, with more students it become more difficult).

- Presentations of complex topics (after that the rest of the students should comment something, ask some question, anything related to the topic)

- Presentation of a handwritten one page hand written notes, diagram, mindmap, etc., about the content discussed.

- Last minute changes to more elaborated programming labs that should be resolved in-class (for example, "the client" changed its mind about some requirement or asked a new feature).

The real problem is that it is a (lot) more work for the teachers and not everyone is willing to "think outside of the box".

(edit: format)

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I hope by 'handwritten' you don't literally mean pen and paper?

Back when I was doing my BSc in Software Engineering, we had a teacher who did her Data Structure and Algorithms exams with pen and paper. On one of them, she basically wrote 4 coding problems (which would be solved in 4 short ~30 LOC).

We had to write the answer with pen and paper, writing the whole program in C. And the teacher would score it by transcribing the verbatim text in her computer, and if it had one single error (missed semicolon) or didn't compile for some reason, the whole thing was considered wrong (each question was 25% of the exam score)

I remember I got 1 wrong (missed semicolon :( ) and got a 75% (1-100 pointing system). It's crazy how we were able to do that sort of thing in the old days.

We definitely exercised our attention to detail and concentration muscles with that teacher.

Yeah, this is absurd. And if you have poor handwriting, the chances of "syntax errors" goes up.

My above comment is getting downvoted, and it's honestly a bit baffling. I'd be furious if I were paying tens of thousands of dollars to receive a university-level education in software engineering in 2025... and I had to write programs with pen and paper. It is so far detached from the reality of, not only the industry, but the practice itself, so as to be utterly absurd.

I graduated in 2018 from a university where writing exams by hand was standard practice. We weren't punished if syntax wasn't correct character-by-character, only if the ideas we were attempting to convey in the message were fundamentally incorrect.

I have incredibly terrible handwriting and recall of specific syntax was difficult, but I wasn't punished terribly for either of those faults.

Already in 2018, almost everyone was cheating on typed assignments, "helping" each other with homeworks, and a significant portion of kids were abusing stimulants to get by. Exams were typically 70-80% of your grade. Now, when I speak with current students at that university and as I observed first-hand in 2020, when they went remote and generally relaxed standards and processes, how the quality of the instruction and the quality of the resulting "educated" students has fallen off the face of a cliff.

I'd be furious if I were paying tens of thousands of dollars to receive a university-level education in software engineering in 2025 and I had no educator willing to put their foot down and stop myself and my peers from faking the fact that we know anything indicating that we deserve the degree. What's a degree worth when nobody is willing to do the work required and lay down the tough love necessary to actually educate you?

The professor is not actually compiling your code, the idea is to know whether you can pseudo code a solution, of course.

> if it had one single error (missed semicolon) or didn't compile for some reason, the whole thing was considered wrong

From GP

That's exceedingly rare I imagine, and stupid.

I had to hand-write 90% of my programming exams. Nobody cared about semicolons, they cared if your algorithm worked. You didn't even really need to program in C, just something that looked close enough.

No, you don't write code by hand. Maybe pseudo-code, analize some given code or you have to specify the general architecture for a system. But in other courses, for example operating systems, networks, distributed systems you have to answer questions like "when udp is the right choice over tcp?", "what kind of problems are associated with pagination?", "what are vector clocks?", etc., using pen and paper.

Yes, pen and paper.

Yes, pen and paper. The approach is to pseudocode the solution, minor syntax errors aren’t punished (and indeed are generally expected anyway). The point is to simply show that you understand and can work through the concepts involved, it’s not being literally compiled.

Writing a small algorithm with pen & paper on programming exams in universities of all sizes was still common when I was in uni in the 2010s and there’s no reason to drop that practice now.

Small algorithms, sure.

Outside of algorithms courses, the practice has diminishing practicality.

I once had to write a filesystem driver for a code, and it ended up being a little less than a thousand lines of C. I’m happy I didn’t need to do that on paper, it would have had limited value to my learning.

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