College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

That was common when I studied computer science in the nineties as well. Hand written exams mostly.

Writing papers is a useful skill to have. And many students aren't very good at that. I taught some classes during my Ph. D. and supervised some students with their master thesis and PhD thesis work. Many students get their degrees without that really getting addressed. At least Computer science degrees in the Netherlands just spend very little time on writing skills. You get students with high school levels of English and Dutch and that's it.

I learned to write properly only when I started my Ph. D. My supervisor made me do it right before he allowed me to submit papers for publication.

AI might actually be good for education long term. It will result in a more personalized approach, which I think is good. There are plenty of ways to test students that are more engaging and interesting for both teachers and students than some of the old ways. You can't fake knowledge when you do a verbal test. Or test people with a good old written exam.

And of course for teachers, you can automate a lot of the verification work. This can be a lot of work.

In Spain, the whole university system was like that until like 15ish years ago. Exams were king, in most courses they were worth 80%-90%, and of course always in person.

Then we did a university reform, partly with the excuse of aligning with the rest of the EU within the Bologna process (and I say "excuse" because that's what it was, because the politicians introduced some things with that pretense that weren't like that in the rest of the EU at all, and it was perfectly possible to comply with Bologna without doing them) and partly to copy the US/UK ways. And one of the pillars of that reform was continuous assessment, and evaluating coursework.

As a consequence of this, first of all working class students were royally screwed. Because suddenly it wasn't OK to just organize yourself to prepare the exam, you had to attend lots of sessions to earn points, which put students who work at a disadvantage. And second, passing by cheating became possible, even before LLMs. People tend to forget that before everyone got access to ChatGPT, some people had access to experts (family members, or even paying someone to do the work).

Now that this kind of cheating has been democratized and everyone can do it instead of just the most privileged with access to experts or money to pay them, people act all outraged. Although pretty much nothing is being done, except for using snake oil detectors, or sometimes increasing difficulty of assignments to make them LLM-proof (with which you screw the students who actually want to learn without LLMs).

They spent years indoctrinating us (professors) in training courses on how the old exam-based ways were wrong (the "Napoleonic" model, they called it... none of them seems to entertain the thought that maybe if it had been working essentially unchanged since Napoleon it wasn't that bad, and you need solid reasons to change it beyond "this is old so let's change") and the new ways were the bee's knees. Like in the Milgram experiment, it's difficult for people to back down and acknowledge that they have been wrong, even when the solution is obvious.

Missing the /s? Most people have a calculator in their pocket all the time now.

I remember having to split bar tabs by hand at the end of the night without a calculator. The waiter delivers a hand-written bill, and we'd calculate how much each person owed, splitting drinks individually and food equally, recalculating tax and tip to derive each person's total. We'd pool the cash in the middle of the table (with people taking their own change as they go where possible), then counting all the cash and making sure it still included sufficient tip. All after many pints. I do NOT miss those days.

I completely disagree with you.

You can do all the same learning with AI tools, with the added benefit of developing extra skills on top.

This notion that AI automatically reduces learning seems more born out of fear than reality. There are also different kinds of learning.

People who really want to can still go back to typewriters. Forcing it into a mandatory curriculum though is a step backwards. Just like it would have been pre AI.

For most students the "purpose" of studying computer science at university is to get a better job and make more money. And for the people for whom this isn't the case, they're generally smart and motivated enough to learn the extra details they're interested in by themselves.