401–410 of 451 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve been typing for years since the 80s. However, even in the 90s I found any extended period of handwriting to be painful and laborious. I don’t think I could handle an instructor that insisted on handwritten long form but I’d happily accept a compromise in the form of a typewriter.
Sorry to say you can't take my class.
When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.
Which strikes me as a terrible way to teach and test programming skills. If you're teaching to program without so much as syntax highlighting, you're not preparing your students for anything that even remotely resembles the industry they aspire to work in.
Honestly, these days universities should probably find a way to incorporate AI into their teaching, rather than fight it. Anything else is betting that AI will not stick around, which strikes me as a hopelessly naïve bet. Especially for software development.
I don't pretend to have all the answers, I don't know how to teach systems thinking in a appropriate way either. But I'm pretty sure typewriters isn't it, unless your students are hoping to get hired by Ada Lovelace, it's just not going to be relevant.
When I did my Computer Science degree the vast majority of courses were 50% final, 30% midterm - even programming exams were hand written, proctored by TAs in class or in the gymnasium - assignments/labs/projects were a small part of your grade but if you didn’t do them the likelihood you’d pass the term exams was pretty darn low. We already had AI proof education.
>even programming exams were hand written Which strikes me as a terrible way to teach and test programming skills. If you're teaching to program without so much as syntax highlighting, you're not preparing your students for anything that even remotely resembles the industry they aspire to work in. Honestly, these days universities should probably find a way to incorporate AI into their teaching, rather than fight it.…
Education isn't any churning out a cog fitted to a bigger gear. A college education should not be preparing you for intellij or familiarizing you with va code.
It should be teaching foundational skills with the discipline. And I just don't understand how you look at the amazing things we've accomplished since ww2 and say "the education system that taught this fucking sucks"
A lot of people in this thread are talking about how they did in-person exams, handwritten problem sets in class, etc. This kind of thing is more challenging in the humanities, where the research paper is kind of our bread and butter. A lot of us have since turned to different kinds of assignments, but I am not ready to forego research papers in favor of blue book exams. I think there's some value in having to develo…
I'm not sure of if typewriters help for assignments. People will just rewrite what the AI wrote
The next thing that happens is a befuddled "Ask HN: Why Do All The Daisy Wheel Printers On Ebay Suddenly Cost Thousands Of Dollars?".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing
You can sometimes locally win an arms race by doing something really exotic that isn't worth the work to defeat, but this is definitely not a strategy that works if everyone adopts it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The things I don’t like about putting too much weight in the exams are: * It’s sort of unnecessarily high stakes for the students; a couple hours to determine your grade for many hours of studying. * It’s pretty artificial in general; in “real life” you have the ability to go around online and look for sources. This puts a pretty low ceiling on the level of complexity you can actually throw at them.
Exams happen all the time in real life. Or rather, situations where you can't just look up fundamental knowledge. Job interviews, presentations, even mundane work tasks - all these require you to know the basics quickly "The basics" are relative, of course, but I often point out to my students: "you don't care if your doctor needs to look up the specific interactions of your various meds. You do care if you see them…
Sounds like you're saying that it's acceptable to be a little foggy about the limits of your knowledge, as long as you remember the core foundations. For a first year medicine student, the edge of their knowledge will include things that are the core foundation of a practicing doctor. Why should such a student be tested as if he already had several years of familiarity with the subject when this is all relatively new material to him?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the only defense of the new model is that it forces students to learn throughout the semester, rather than just before the exam. Which is easier and more effectively engages long term memory (like doing more rounds of spaced repetition). I definitely could tell the difference, though most of the time I just studied full 4-7 days before the exam.
If seven days of study are sufficient to pass the class, why is so little material being taught in one semester? It sounds like the exams are far too easy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>even programming exams were hand written Which strikes me as a terrible way to teach and test programming skills. If you're teaching to program without so much as syntax highlighting, you're not preparing your students for anything that even remotely resembles the industry they aspire to work in. Honestly, these days universities should probably find a way to incorporate AI into their teaching, rather than fight it.…
> remotely like the industry they'll work in Education isn't any churning out a cog fitted to a bigger gear. A college education should not be preparing you for intellij or familiarizing you with va code. It should be teaching foundational skills with the discipline. And I just don't understand how you look at the amazing things we've accomplished since ww2 and say "the education system that taught this fucking sucks…
Students today aren't studying to repeat the progress made since the forties, that's been done by their grandparents, they're looking to drive the next 40 years of innovation, and if that involves typewriters I'll eat my hat
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The things I don’t like about putting too much weight in the exams are: * It’s sort of unnecessarily high stakes for the students; a couple hours to determine your grade for many hours of studying. * It’s pretty artificial in general; in “real life” you have the ability to go around online and look for sources. This puts a pretty low ceiling on the level of complexity you can actually throw at them.
> It’s pretty artificial in general; in “real life” you have the ability to go around online and look for sources. Sort of. In real life, you are expected to have immediate knowledge of your field and (in some environments) be able to perform under pressure. I'm not going to pretend the curriculum is a perfect match for what people should know, but it does provide a common baseline to be able to have a common point o…
How is that not high stakes? The result of several months worth of effort hinges on what they do during a 2-3-hour window. If you had to build something and the last step involved a procedure that could potentially tear down everything you made, you would try to find a way to redesign it so that didn't happen, or to limit the scope of the damage.