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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

I had to do "write code on paper" stuff as part of french engineering school entrance exams.

It's fine (tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"), but it limits what kinds of problems you can reasonably put on the exam. You'll definitely lean a bit more into theoretical stuff than practicals. Which is fine for some courses, I think a bit less interesting in other courses.

Remember, the hand written code is also harder for reviewers to grade! You have to manually run the code in your head, for example

Having said all that... "we've booked the computer room, you don't have internet, go type up all your stuff in this VM we have set up" feels fine if you don't like this constraint IMO

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GP is talking about every test being done on a computer presumably to avoid handwriting. Handwriting isn’t the usual “get with the times, grandpa” situation. It’s been proven again and again that writing by hand develops the brain and helps store that new knowledge better. It would be a disservice to the students to only use typing. Or TikTok shorts, or whatever is the tech of the day.

Exams shouldn’t probably be used for learning new information and typing is a lot more efficient and allows editing and revising so there are advantages to that.

> or whatever is the tech of the day.

Rote memorisation has been the standard technique probably for way longer that anything else so I’m not sure that every innovation is inherently inferior to what we had before

Handwriting is still “new information” by the time you are in university? How do you feel about reading when text to speech and LLM summarization are so advanced now?

No wonder some people are so easy to replace with an LLM.

>It's fine (tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"),

this would also end up valorizing particular ways of thinking or developing, so those whose development methodology is more exploratory until you get a certain point where you get an overarching view of how everything should interact and then go into a quicker iterative mode would be penalized.

I guess it's ok it does this, some things after all must be valorized whatever is chosen, although I've known many people who are quite good using this way of working who would then be downgraded.

They can just do that iterating on a draft paper before doing the final version.

Meanwhile I had to do VHDL to design a chip and then write code for it in paper, and get the actual solution the software that was meant to run in my imaginary processor to work, detailing both the code and what we thought our code was doing. Teacher and TAs would later make it run in a Xilinx to grade and make themselves available at a few hours if you wanted to discuss your grade/solution with them at a later time with the thing actually running in a board.

We had 3 hours to make the test. The papers the teacher delivered had differences between them (I think it was four different versions of the test?). The Teacher didn’t stay in the class also, you had to deliver the test to them later in their office.

> have to manually run the code in your head

If you're doing a good job, you have to do that anyway, or at least have enough of a spidey sense for broken code to know when to investigate and add an extra test case.

Something like 30% of the time at $WORK, interviewers report the candidate as having solved the problem when a closer inspection reveals UB, memory corruption, and other bullshit. The test cases pass, and I think that's part of the problem. You can't tune out and avoid deeply understanding the submission.

I'm fine with paper tests as a tradeoff, but in the real world where I am paid to program, I am a strong advocate of advanced type checkers/compilers and other static code analysis tools because they can keep all the code "in their head." They can keep far, far more code "in their head" than even the most gifted programming savants. Literally as I type out a mistake, the type checker alerts me to it.

So in some theoretical hiring example, if I have to choose between two candidates: one which is really good at keeping the code in the head and the other who is less good at that, but who is very skilled at using programming tools like advanced type systems or formal verification tools, then I'd prefer the latter.

Of course in practice, I would of course take a student that I knew had passed their paper test with their own knowledge over a student that likely ran their digital test through an LLM.

> If you're doing a good job

I think the problem is that the grader has to run your code in their head. That's a whole different problem.

I would imagine every professor (or assistant) who graded any programming exam I wrote was doing just that and further expect them to let some things slide as long as the general direction was correct.

They can OCR them and run them for real.

This would be HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) not OCR and HTR is a lot harder than OCR especially for modern scripts (i.e. student's scrawls). And at every error the reviewer now needs to check if it was due to an error in the code or due to a bad HTR somewhere in the code.

I'd say compared to just typing the code on a disconnected computer: Not worth it.

And then you can grade them on important syntactic issues that really matter, like tabs -vs- spaces.

do they? OCR has gotten pretty good in 2026.

Good, the grader should hone that skill at pace then.

The student has to submit one exam.

The grader has to grade N exams.

Which is literally what graduate students get paid to do.

How do you think English, philosophy, or history tests get graded?

Do you think every institution of higher education has a ready supply of grad students to just throw at problems that require manpower?

Or were you just assuming your experiences (large university, I'm guessing) are universal?

Yes. That's exactly what college is. If you don't have the resources to effectively individually evaluate a student's output, you shouldn't hold a graded class.

Then let me spell it out for you, since you seem to be unaware:

There are many, many colleges that have no grad students. Period. They are undergraduate colleges.

Expecting any college or university to just be able to scale up the amount of manpower required to grade their classes/exams by a large multiple is absurdly unrealistic. I assure you that most existing colleges do have plenty of resources to effectively evaluate individual students' outputs, if they don't have to assume that anything submitted digitally is written by LLMs.

That new requirement is a massive change to how they operate, and it's incredibly rude and short-sighted to be dismissive and contemptuous of institutions that have trouble adjusting to it.

These colleges certainly have English, Philosophy, Art, and History classes, all of which require papers to be submitted and the exams consist of essay questions.

That Computer Science is somehow a privileged subject where the exam grading must be automated is elitism of the highest degree.

> I had to do "write code on paper" stuff as part of french engineering school entrance exams.

Interesting. This reminds me of COBOL and FORTRAN "code sheets" that were used back in the day...

> we've booked the computer room, you don't have internet

How practical is this?

1. Is your institution able to provide this support?

2. Do you believe you are able to supervise the room well enough that students will be caught if they cheat? (Eg, bring a phone and look up answers.)

2 is “fine”, or that’s just the status quo. The friction from copying over stuff from a tiny phone screen discretely is the cost to cheat as well

I don’t know about 1s practicality. In my schooling it would always be doable but I have the impression US schools are a different scale

I graduated from a not so incredible university and we had multiple such rooms. Teaching assistants and some tutors helped supervising the exams and it wasn't easy to cheat without getting caught.

>How practical is this?

This is basically how ICPC works (https://icpc.global/)

Contestant computers boot a Linux image that contains all the interpreters/compilers and documentation for the supported languages, some editors/IDEs(vim, Jetbrains, Eclipse, etc) and a web browser.

Network access is limited to the judging system only.

My experience in Europe is that most universities can support this.

Jfc, this is a solved problem at the community college near me. All of the computers in the testing room are thin clients that effectively remote into a vm, and you get checked with a metal detector before going into the room with the computers.

If you can escape the vm on the fly and manage to use an llm to cheat, you deserve that A.

> tho annoying when you lose points to "typos"

IME, that kind of nitpicky grading mostly happens when the exam was designed too easy and does not depend on the medium.

> Remember, the hand written code is also harder for reviewers to grade! You have to manually run the code in your head, for example

Which you really need to do anyway because code that is broken due to a brainfart and code that is broken because of a fundamental misunderstanding should not receive the same grade.

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