I'm 60+. I'd be more concerned about the student's physical ability to write for several hours continuously. Writer's cramp used to be a problem, and that was when we were used to hand-writing everything. Legibility is also a consideration: I have to hand-write a lot(keyboards would not be socially acceptable for some of my work), and even with decades of practice and a hand that I designed for legibility, sometimes I have difficulty reading my own writing.
I have absolutely no concern over a 20 yr old's ability to weather the rigors of manipulating a 7 gram pencil. It's not like we're talking about getting them to spend a week on a roofing crew or swap their gaming mouse for a set of post hole diggers here. If someone needs an accommodation then that should absolutely be made available.
Nothing to do with weight. It's a cramp in the muscles of the hand from holding the pen and making fine movements for hours. I'm guessing you are from a generation after keyboard use became common, so you haven't encountered it.
Right and wrong. I am of a generation before common keyboard usage. As far as writers cramp goes, we all got it from time to time. At worst it was a minor nuisance compared to the skinned knees, bruises, and occasional broken bone that we racked up recreationally.
I'm all for handwritten tests, but it's more complicated than that. If you're actually writing for 2hr+ and haven't studied appropriate technique or bought some sort of crutch like a pencil holder then the repetitive motion will absolutely cause cramps for a fraction of the class regardless of being 20ish and healthy, and they might not find that out until they're forced to write for 2hr. The muscles manipulating a pencil (with poor technique) are much smaller than those manipulating a post hole digger, so that comparison isn't fair.
Not in my experience, nobody complained of that during my studies. 74 exams over 5 years ca. 2h long, also 2h long lectures, often without pause, back-to-back with another such lecture (but max 2 in a row)
A good exam also has breaks between writing because you need them to think about what you are going to write. An exam that is just about writing down words as fast as you can is going to suck whether that's handwritten or with a keyboard.
We have to notice that high stakes exams on paper worked for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, and high stakes exams on personal laptops have been tried for approximately six years and worked for none of them. With that framing, I don’t think the burden of proof is on the side saying that kids can take exams on paper?
They have, but antiquity is not necessarily a good argument. I attended a university which required examinees to wear a black suit, white bow tie, bands, and a gown. I don't recommend it.
But this is missing the point. The issue is not that people in general can't write by hand for hours, but that these particular people may have difficulty.
> We have to notice that high stakes exams on paper worked for hundreds, possibly thousands of years
Define “worked” there are reasons we have abandoned quite a few archaic practices which turned to be highly ineffective in hindsight (and often quite misery inducing). I’m not implying that handwriting is one of them just that it’s a terrible argument.
> burden of proof is on the side saying that kids
Smacking children who fail to give a correct answer with a stick worker for thousands of years as well..
You should definitely take speed into consideration. If your're writing an essay, being able to type it out and still have both the opportunity and time to edit it is great. If you're writing it on paper, you likely have neither. What comes to you first is what's submitted.
When I was in grade school the common practice was to use the back page of the exam booklet to do a quick outline (assuming there was no other scrap paper available) and just cross it out when you were done with it. Being able to organize your thoughts and maintain a clear direction in writing 500-1000 words seems like an important thing to test for.
And that's exactly the point! By making sure the student can't edit the entire text once its written, you force him to think about the essay's structure and force him to plan much more before writing :)
Absolutely! That's why they are students: you learn to walk before you learn to run. Students should be forced to plan their texts and practice getting better at that. Whenever they leave school, they'll be able to write even better texts than the essays.
Honestly, school essays, as a text genre, suck to read. They are not meant to be enjoyable, beautiful texts! Instead, they are meant to help gauge the student's ability at text planning, the quality of their text project, their grammatical knowledge, and orthography.
I must say I'd be open to seeing schools attempting other models, though, and measuring the results thereafter to see in practice what happens when students type their essays instead. In terms of text projects and planning, that could be interesting and train different skills.
If the goal is to assess the ability of the student to produce a professional product, then why prevent them from using AI in the first place? The vast majority of professionals have access to AI nowadays?
Most curricula should probably feature both forms of assessment, demonstrating your knowledge of the basics in a closed book assessment and your ability to produce high quality final products using all resources available to you in take home assignments.
It's not JUST about output, it's also about learning. The output is a way to measure the learning, it's not important of itself except as a reflection of the student's mastery of the curriculum.
You're thinking of the output as the goal rather than as the means to an end.
No, I’m not? As I said, you should assess whether people know the basics (I.e. are they learning) by testing without AI tools available. However, I believe you need to learn how to employ AI tools, just as you need to learn how to use a word processor. And the best way to do that is through experience.
If you’re suggesting that the test favors those capable of arranging their thoughts and words before putting pen to paper then.... I’m not sure there’s a problem
Sure but given any length of time, which does tend to be finitely allocated for a test (if for no other reason than the prof or proctor does have other places to be eventually), having to hand write is slower and harder to revise, which means it's harder to get that full, understanding-demonstrating essay, done and polished.
What? Suppose you want to fix the opening of your essay. Best case it's pencil and you can erase some, but worst case you have a longer sentence you want to put in there so you can't do it without scribbling all over and making a mess of the page. Word processors let you edit. How is this controversial?
> why is the speed it takes to write it at all relevant?
Okay, so from first principles:
1. Time is finite, we will all perish
2. Unless you are doing open book, needs to be supervised (proctored / or prof/TA is there)
3. That person is paid for a shift
4. That shift must end
5. Therefore, anything that enables people to write faster is good for the students, who can get more paper written, or the paper better revised, during the finite time available for writing.
> 5. Therefore, anything that enables people to write faster is good for the students, who can get more paper written, or the paper better revised, during the finite time available for writing.
I think you're missing some logic in there somewhere. If a student fills in as many pages as they can, each with the number 1 written on it as large as possible, was this a good conclusion? The quantity of writing is not a good metric.
EDIT: to give a closer to reality example, an essay that's 4 times longer than a competing essay does not make it better.
Not sure why you're getting so hyperbolic. The point isn't to write as much as possible, it's to be able to get all of your points across. I'm not talking about where the "answer" is 10 words long, I was thinking of a general essay. Longer isn't better, however, half an essay may be pretty useless to get a good grade, and if you can write twice as fast, you have a much less chance of running out of time, for any quantity of "time" without having to allocate hours, wasting more proctor time and making exams harder to schedule. Because like someone else said, they don't impose a time limit to screw the slowest-writing students, they do it for practicality (my above comment was trying to explain that).
It’s fine to erase or use scratch paper on an essay test.
You don’t write the test to fill the 60 minute slot. You time it so students are able to finish early if they’re really good. Slow ones need the whole time but can still do well if they understand the material being tested.
Well, to some extent, yes. Of course the literal number of works you can write per minute is not, but:
- someone with a good understanding will often come to a concise, clear answer while someone struggling will produce a convoluted paragraph.
- the way to get to the result will vary depending on your understanding (e.g., are you blindly applying some method or understanding what's going on). For instance, "hey, this is a vector field, I don't need to evaluate this complex integral, I just need to compute the difference between the start and endpoint of the curve!". Both answers will be correct, but one denotes a much better actual understanding (and will take way less time).
I meant to say they usually aren’t a rush for non-ace students, just a full hour. You have to work diligently, though. Competitive tests excepted, obviously.
I literally explained this above. No one is trying to rush the students or punish the slowest writers. It's because time is finite and having tests sized so that it's impossible for the slowest test-taker to even feel rushed means that the test time period needs to be much longer. That means higher costs for paying the proctor and makes them much harder to schedule since you need enough very long non-overlapping test periods that every standard class scheduling slot has a corresponding exam period (and think of midterms -- those often have to fit in a standard class period, or else if someone takes longer, that might blow through another class).
Re "hand writing is harder to revise", I never had an issue with erasing words or parts of the text and using asterisks, end footnotes, the margins and whatever free space available (with arrows or not) to do revisions in written exams. Nobody complained and afaik it was fairly standard to do where I studied, as long as your exam itself was actually legible. Granted, I refer to math-related exams not essays on literature or philosophy where form may have mattered more. On the other hand, I cannot imagine writing any math during an exam on a computer.
I would often do a bullet point summary/outline of my answer on the paper. That would have arrows and insertions and crossed-out stuff everywhere -- it was usually a mess.
But then I'd use that to write the actual text answer, and consequently, it was mostly clean. I'd still have to cross stuff out or add a phrase between the lines every so often, but once the basic structure was done, that was mostly unnecessary.
And if I was ever pressed for time, I'd usually get part marks for the outline anyway. Depending on the subject, I'd sometimes race through the questions doing just the outlines, and then come back to write the full text as a complete second pass.
To be fair, this wasn't creative writing. I think it'd be harder when the expression is the content.
That's a strawman. I said bottlenecking testing by requiring hand writing is stupid. Put another way - you're meant to be using the test to be thinking and re-thinking the problem and articulating approaches and solutions, not use your time, effort and energy on managing quill and paper.
It's not a strawman. If the test is designed so that you have spend most of the time thinking about your answer then even doubling the writing time has not significant impact.
>The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the student's understanding of the material, not their WPM.
Testing for understanding requires the fastest WPM possible. Regardless of the method used, students don't all write at the same speed. To minimize the influence of this variance, they need to use the fastest writing technique possible. If a fast writer spends 30 minutes writing in a two hour test, and a slow writer needs a full hour, the fast writer gets 50% more thinking time. But if you double both their writing speeds, the fast writer's advantage drops to 17%.
The faster the writing technique people are allowed to use, the better your test can identify poor understanding.
