In a digital world, assessments taken on paper can feel useless or antiquated, but they provide the most meaningful learning and insights for both students and professors. By removing outside tools abundant through internet access, in-person assignments with a fully analog modality isolate the students’ knowledge and understanding in a manner that prepares them for real world applications. Testing on paper better measures a student’s performance while providing them with meaningful experiences to draw from.
All students at Tech will take a computer science class, and with it, they will learn a new way of problem-solving that is less dependent on a computer than one might think. It can be easy to dismiss paper coding tests in CS classes as difficult simply for the sake of difficulty. However, they promote a deeper understanding of the class content and provide experiences similar to many job interviews. When taking a coding test on paper, one cannot rely on the assistance of a coding editor that reminds the user of the correct formatting or a compiler to help debut code. Instead, one must have a more robust knowledge of the syntax rules and debugging techniques.
While studying for a paper coding test, students therefore will focus more heavily on these extremely critical aspects of the skill. Especially in foundational coding classes, a thorough enough understanding of the class concepts to successfully write code on paper is critical to their success in future courses and beyond. Moreover, many technical interviews for jobs where coding is a required skill utilize live paper coding as part of the process. Those who have experience with this skill in previous high-pressure environments like exams are at a notable advantage in these circumstances.
From the perspective of a professor or test administrator, paper testing in-person creates an environment where cheating is more difficult compared to online examinations which creates an incentive for students to properly study and learn the material. With generative AI more accessible than ever before, assessing students in environments where they are unable to utilize this tool and must actually take the test for themselves is better for them and for those assessing them. When students must put the work in to learn and then demonstrate their learning, they are much better off than when they were able to get by without doing so.
Though high tech solutions exist to limit academic dishonesty in the online testing environment, one of the largest downsides to software like Honorlock is the violation of student privacy. Honorlock records your screen, webcam and the websites users visit, then uses AI to determine if the user’s test-taking behavior is suspicious enough to warrant a human proctor. When taking a test using this style of proctoring, students can feel as though they are under a high level of surveillance, which increases testing anxiety and removes focus from the assignment at hand.
Students enter exams not knowing if the face they naturally make when they are thinking through a problem might be flagged as suspicious, or if their tears would be grounds for investigation (as some students have alleged). In contrast, a simple paper test in a classroom with in-person proctors doesn’t require a student to agree to surveillance to the same degree. They are not being recorded, their facial expressions are not being microanalyzed by AI and they are not worried about their web browser activity being monitored.
Paper tests are an opportunity for students to show off what they actually know from the work that they have invested, rather than their ability to use AI or other tools to generate their work for them. By focusing on these opportunities and taking them seriously, we foster an academic environment that prioritizes competence and hard work over just efficient AI usage.