Comment by timr

8 months ago

...and yet, somehow we managed?

> Show some imagination for why other people hold their positions.

I say that as someone who has also graded piles of paper exams in graduate school (also not that long ago!)

I don't believe the argument you are making is true, but if the primary objection really is that teachers have to grade, then no, I don't have any sympathy.

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timr

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bee_rider  8 months ago

It sorta depends on the material… I always thought paper programming tests were dumb: when I was taking them and when I was proctoring/grading them. It is not that similar to writing a program in an IDE where it will tell you if you make a little mistake, and often help you work your way through it.

We made it. But, that’s survivorship bias, right? We can’t really know how much potential has wasted.

  • falcor84  8 months ago

    Hear, hear!

    Doing programming on paper seems to me like assessing someone's skills in acrobatics by watching them do the motions in a zero-gravity environment. Without the affordances given by the computer, it's just not the same activity.

    • timr  8 months ago

      Computer science, the academic discipline, is to programming as mechanics is to bowling.

      You can very easily test CS concepts on paper, and programming is demonstrated via group projects.

      1 reply →

    • m4rtink  8 months ago

      I kinda had this sentiment until I actually started working - quite often an issue only manifests at an obscure customer system or is a race condition that it too rare to catch reliably, yet happens often enough so you can't just ignore it.

      To solve those in a reasonable amount of time, you need to form a mental model of what is going on & how to fix it. Having access to a computer by itself won't really help for those.

      In that context paper exams for computer science make much more sense to me now - they want you to understand the problem and provide a solution, with pen and paper being the output format.

eru  8 months ago

> ...and yet, somehow we managed?

People in the past put up with all kinds of struggles. They had to.

> I don't believe the argument you are making is true, but if the primary objection really is that teachers have to grade, then no, I don't have any sympathy.

I have no clue what the primary objection really is. I was responding to "I don't see why this is so hard", which just shows a lack of imagination.