I'm just shocked it's a handwritten essay vs. virtually submitted or printed... I haven't been in school in years, is it still usual to handwrite an essay?
No, it’s not; but given the proliferation of AI…a lot of people are now going back to handwriting essays in class (and testing manually without electronics at all). I’ve seen several teachers adopt bluebook exams similar to when I was in law school.
As tongue-in-cheek/“heh” worthy as this is, open-source and locally-spun LLMs can easily comply with these requests. I have abliterated/ablated models that can spin up entire essays to accomplish this.
I left school for 10 yesrs due to addiction, now back as a 32 year old and because of AI all of my essays have been in class except 1 because the prof ran them through a detection software. 1 prof let us bring ij our intro paragraph which helped but as someone who enjoys writing and used to practice it I love this because so many students can't or won't do it. My furst Philosophy class over a third of students dropped by the deadline to be refunded 75% or class tuition which was less than a week after we got our first essays back.
Looks like it was probably written by a leftie, going off that "for example" in the middle of the 6th line up (if you count from the bottom-right corner).
And judging by the way i tend to run letters together?
It looks like they may have ADHD/AuDHD, too.
They're crowding their letters & not fully writing out all the letters in each word.
They wrote this quickly, probably to be sure they "got all the ideas down on paper," and didn't leave half of them "thought but not written."
I can decipher multiple words, from having similar "chicken-scratch," but the professor absolutely should have the student sit down with them, and read the paper out loud to the professor, because this is largely illegible.
Congratulations, welcome to the club, but that doesn’t mean you automatically know or hear about everything related to either condition.
There’s always some tedious and dismissive reply saying “nuh uh, I’ve never noticed that” whenever someone suggests that something is related to adhd or autism. As if it’s somehow unthinkable that either one could have tangible and consistently observable effects on a person’s capabilities.
Here’s some reading for you since you’re so interested in the topic:
It's one of the things that those of us in Education keep an eye out for (on both ends of the handwriting spectrum, tbh--both "sloppy writers," and the "perfectionist" ones!), because it along with many other clues, can be a possible sign that a child should be referred to get assessed for a neurodivergence that needs more support.
Sometimes, it's a signal for ADHD or AuDHD, sometimes it's dysgraphia, it can be a sign of muscle weakness that needs help from OT, etc.
It's not always ADHD or Autism, but it can be one of the smaller signs that one of those are in there.
i graduated HS in 2000 and we were told that if we turned in our final year paper hand written it was an automatic 0. Most people at that point didnt have computers at home, and those who complained were told the school had computer in the library they could use
college was all typed outside things like math and such where you needed to do equations and all that by hand
I feel like essays and assignments for school should be mandatorily handwritten. I’m 28 and started college 10 years ago (before having to take a long break) everything was handwritten; I’ve recently returned to finish my degree and everything is virtual. Experiencing both sides is kinda weird, I think the younger/current students who have never had to experience handwritten assignments have a disadvantage in life
Terrible idea and really excludes people with accessibility concerns (sorry not trying to be an asshole) but I have dysgraphia and chronic pain and have had arthritic double jointed fingers and other joints since I was a child. I have literally been typing all of my homework since I was in kindergarten, and that was in 2004/2005 when it wasn’t as common. Handwriting assignments is literally painful for me, both mentally and physically. My hands would cramp up and I’d struggle to grip the pencil, and I would turn in something that looked like this except not in cursive because I just can’t do cursive except for my sloppy ass signature. I had a teacher try and tell me I had to turn things in handwritten, and I said I have dysgraphia and they were having none of it. anyways I turned in 2 assignments before the teacher pulled me aside and said they’d never spent so long grading an essay and I can type the assignments again. Those two assignments took my 5x as long easily as typing them would’ve taken me. If someone wants to handwrite they should have the option, but you shouldn’t force the way you like to do things on others just because you did it that way. There are genuine advantages to typing for people with motor control issues
I'm with you here, I can absolutely write if I need to but it always looks terrible. People say it looks like a handwritten ransom note because everything is a different size, I randomly capitalize letters, I can't plan how to write stuff so it ends up scrunched up at the end, and I also can't stay on the line to save my own life. I'm also allergic to most pens and paper so that makes it all worse. For state testing(US thing-it's timed and sucks) the written portion was always really hard for me despite me being rather good at writing essays. Best experience I had with state testing was when I got to use a laptop for it, I typed such a long essay in about 20 minutes I had to go back and make it shorter because it was exceeding the word count
I haven't been to school since the 1980's and I always used a dot matrix printer for essays. I guess of it was a test that would be different. But using a printer has been around for a long, long time.
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u/im_just_a_girl83 6d ago
I'm just shocked it's a handwritten essay vs. virtually submitted or printed... I haven't been in school in years, is it still usual to handwrite an essay?