AI時代の最終兵器？大学講師がレポート対策に「タイプライター」を導入した理由

ChatGPTなどの生成AIによるレポート作成が当たり前になる中、ある大学講師が学生のAI依存を阻止するための驚きの手段に出ました。それは「タイプライター」の使用です。デジタル化が進む現代において、あえてアナログな手法を取り入れることで、学生自身の思考力を再定義しようとするこの試みは、教育現場におけるAIとの向き合い方に一石を投じています。

I used to make my classes 60-80% project work, 40-80% quizzes all online.

I now do 50% project work, 50% in person quizzes, pencil on paper on page of notes.

I'm increasingly going to paper-driven workflows as well, becoming an expert with the department printer, printing computer science papers for students to read and annotate in class, etc.

Ironically, the traditional bureaucratic lag in university might actually help: we still have a lot of infrastructure for this sort of thing, and university degrees may actually signal competence-beyond-ai-prompting in the future.

We'll see.

When I was in college, your grade fully depended on the oral exam/debate with the professor. Everything else was but the entry ticket.

Not sure anyone even attempted to cheat in that scenario. And the conversations were usually great, although very stressful for us cramming types

What's interesting is that as I understand, folks are using things like Google Docs for papers, and that it's (apparently) straight forward to do analysis on a Google Doc to see, well, the life of the document. How it was typed in, how fast, what was pasted and cut back out.

My understanding is that the Google Doc is not a word processing document, it's an event recording of a word processor. So, in theory, you could just "play back" watching the document being typed in and built to "see" how it was done.

I only mention this because given the AIs, I'm sure even with a typewriter, it's more efficient to have the AI do the work, and then just "type it in" to the typewriter, which kind of invalidates the entire purpose of it in the first place.

The typing in part is inevitable. May as well have a "perfect first draft" to type it in from in the first place.

And we won't mention the old retro interfaces that let you plug in a IBM Selectric as a printer for your computer. (My favorite was a bunch of solenoids mounted above the keys -- functional, but, boy, what a hack.)

TaaS -- Typing as a service. Send us your Markdown file and receive a typed up, double spaced copy via express shipping the next day!

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.

Why are people promoting the idea that exams are not written or given in person anymore? I graduated relatively recently and maybe had 1 take home exam during my entire education. Every other exam was proctored in person and written. The professor who made the take home exam also made it much more difficult than a normal exam so I would not really say it was easier than a normal in person test.

Better dust off that old AlphaSmart!

I think if your university doesn't do in person exams with pen and paper then the degrees it hands out are not much evidence of anything.

If you're not interested in learning the course content, then what are you doing there? Pretty expensive waste of time.

I very fondly recall many of the course I did at university. The exams were a helpful motivating factor even for the interesting courses.

A hand-written essay in class would seem to be a workable mechanism for a student to demonstrate an ability to reason on their own about a subject.

One of my best college professors would review such essays in-person, one-on-one twice each semester.

Reading all these comments, I feel like US universities are a joke.

I had to do all the exams in person. 100% of the grade was decided at the exam. Millions of people graduated this way and they are fine. No students were harmed in the process.

My school couldn't afford typewriters in the 1980's and early 1990's.

We wrote assignments by hand using a pencil or pen.

Is that really complicated?

When I got to college and everything had to be typed I still wrote everything by hand on paper and edited with an eraser and a red pen to reorganize some sentences or paragraphs. Then I would go to the computer lab and type it in and print it out.