Saturday 24th January 2015 - The demise of writing by hand

I wonder how many pieces of extended writing by hand today's undergraduate students do?  Apart from work things such as essays, I would include elements such as hand-written letters.  I observe that most students still take notes in lectures and other classes via the 'traditional' methods of pen and paper, but those notes are for themselves.  Formal writing for someone else to read is another matter.  When we do ask for essays or coursework we generally ask for it to be word processed.  And I suspect that very few students today do as I (and others of my generation) did, writing a letter home from time to time.

While I was an undergraduate I was generally asked to write three essays every fortnight.  Sometimes I read them out in the tutorial, sometimes they were handed in beforehand, sometimes they were read by the tutor and given back at the next tutorial.  Those, of course, were the olden days before word processors.  But they all had to be legible.

Some years ago, in my early days as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Learning and Teaching, I came to the observation I have shared in the first paragraph above - that today's students rarely do extended pieces of formal writing for someone else to read. When they do it is for an exam.  They are not used to it.  I therefore put forward the idea that perhaps 'written' examinations should consist of writing to a screen via a keyboard.  Perhaps the idea was ahead of its time, because I was told that it wasn't technically possible to limit access to the internet for students if they were using a computer, that we couldn't ensure that work was saved properly, and so on and so on.  This was before the invention of tablets where, for example by ensuring that both 3G and wi-fi are turned off, there can be no access to outside information.  Maybe we should once again consider the idea of tablets, or stripped down computers, for all students in exams.

I mention this today because I have just completed the marking of the exam for my third year module.  Well - I haven't quite completed it.  I have become used to student handwriting over the years (and have noticed the long-term deterioration in its legibility, consequent on the things I've talked about above).  But for only the second time in my career I have been completely defeated.  After ten minutes struggling with one essay I found I had reached only the end of the second paragraph, had underlined 20% of the words as incomprehensible, and had completely lost any thread of what the student was trying to say.  I looked at the second essay in the book, and it was clearly worse.

When I went in to exams I was used to writing substantial pieces by hand - and was used to having to write in a manner that others could read.  I wonder what the student whose script I was struggling with today would have got as a mark then - probably 0.  Instead on Monday I will invoke the process for the student to be summoned in to create a supervised transcript of her or his exam script, which I will then have to mark separately from all the others that I completed today.

I wonder if the same thing will happen as occurred when I last invoked this procedure a few years ago?  The girl concerned then, confronted with her exam script, found that she couldn't read it either.