Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnwatson | Hacker News Reader

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.

God forbid people do work

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com