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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

Using a special computer works too. I do my exams with our institution's Computer-Based Testing Facility, a bank of computers with fixed software and firewall rules that only permit connections to the exam site.

As a result, I've been able to challenge students to solve interactive software security challenges on the midterm and final with automatic grading - something that would have been impossible with pen and paper.

Scalability is really the major challenge. We're rolling out more CBTF rooms and rolling out access to other departments due to demand, but it's definitely more resource-intensive than pen-and-paper. One possibility is to treat CBTFs as computer labs when not actively administering exams (or maybe even vice-versa), something we're looking into doing.

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My university does that, it works quite well. The devices net-boot either into a locked down exam OS or regular Debian, depending on the current need.

But what's wrong with pen and paper?

Writing by hand is very painful for some people. I always dreaded blue book exams for this reason, and ended up not writing as much as I wanted because I could not stand the hand pain. Or I got incredibly sloppy so that I could write as fast as possible and get it over with.

I've got kind of messed up hands, but not enough that you'd look at me and say "that guy should get special treatment". From the comments here, there are others like me who similarly hated hand-written tests due to the physical pain of hand writing.

The grading cannot be automated easily and becomes time consuming.

Should anything more complicated than what could be automated with a paper ScanTron form really be subject to automated grading anyway?

Right? For all the money paid by modern students is it unreasonable to expect some expert human interaction? The cost explosion has been centered outside the classroom, elsewhere in the org, so can't play that card.

You should see how little many of the people providing that expert human interaction are paid. My wife is a professor (in the humanities) with 2 decades of experience and degrees from excellent schools, gets top reviews from students as well and she barely earns enough to live on. If I weren't in tech we would be financially destitute. She already works 60 hours a week with just the courses, prep, grading and meetings she has... any more and she would probably just keel over and faint.

A strong argument for reform. The costs of higher education have multiplied while the people providing the education have probably not moved meaningfully, or may have declined with inflation. All that money going to management and other executive corporate positions should be clawed back. How can a person enter a contract to be in debt for decades and your spouse is still paid so little from the arrangement? It’s wage theft.

Professors basically arent paid, really. All judgments about the matter take place inside the Baumol cost illusion. Study the total collapse of pay since the 50s as measured against other highly trained services like physicians nurses dentists.

the existence of scantron and the laziness of teachers have turned nearly all assessments into multiple choice which is a terrible type of question. Now we have the technology to have better more signal-heavy types of questions to also be graded automatically. seems like a good thing.

Teacher salaries have collapsed since the fifties - when, by the way, we could get the brainuest element of half the population due to institutional sexism. My jr high teachers would be federal judges today. They were worth about 7 times what we paid them then; we pay them less in relation to other highly trained services today.

It can be automated by making the assistant professor do it.

Grading written papers has worked fine for 200 years at least.

It can, but you don't want to hear about it: Hand writing recognition is an application of AI.

God forbid people do work

Unless you do a test type exam, Handwriting gets worse when you are out of time or the space is limited. It also adds a lot of stress because ink can be stuck on the pen or the pen can roll out of the table or be lost.

People perfectly smart, but with cryptic handwriting will have much worse results for the same exam on pen and paper vs with a keyboard.

I personally find it hard to read my own handwriting sometimes and I really have tried to improve for years. In an exam situation though its extra pressure to write quickly so its very hard to make it legible.

> firewall rules that only permit connections to the exam site.

... did LANs (Ethernet, with wifi disabled) stop being a thing?

The machines are connected via Ethernet (reliability!) but our exams are hosted on Internet sites like PrairieLearn and Canvas. Those are a lot easier to work with than, say, having to load exams onto a machine accessible on a private LAN.

Yes, said machine could have both the LAN connectivity and WAN access, and we could set up the whole exam website on it, but we would lose out on the flexibility to let profs choose the platform that works best for them.

This is just...depressing. BSL-4-like rooms just to test university students.

I'm sure you're exaggerating, but the exam process in a CBTF is pretty lightweight. Students arrive, drop off their bags and phone etc., check in (swipe an ID card, get their picture matched), log into the computer and the exam website. When the exam starts, they refresh the site and do the exam; we've got proctors in the room as usual to watch for any conventional cheating (using a phone, consulting a friend).

If you find that onerous, I guess a paper exam would probably also feel pretty depressing to you.

The loss of trust would be the depressing part (to me). That said the amount of cheating I witnessed in undergrad was also depressing.

TBH - for me, it’s an opportunity to do a different kind of exam, with a level of interactivity and realism that isn’t possible with paper exams. It is possible but much more annoying to run such exams in a BYOD setting: for example, the lack of consistency between people’s machines, and the risk of device failures, are just two reasons why BYOD is hard even before you get into the cheating aspects.

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