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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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