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669 points danso | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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nmstoker ◴[] No.23262122[source]
Clearly needs to be solved and fast, and I have huge sympathy for those affected.

However to me the more interesting point is why anyone would want to submit a handwritten script when they could type it. Not to sound like an old foggey, but in my day the only people who got to type were dyslexic and it gave them a huge advantage (no doubt why so many parents were having their children tested). Even if you could write fast, why take the chance that your exam efforts could be rejected based on a marker not being able to read your writing. Add to that the ability to compose text far more easily when typing and for those with a modest amount of practice the dramatically faster rate of output and it seems really strange that everyone doesn't type them and they just avoid this problem entirely.

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ReverseCold ◴[] No.23262264[source]
Some tests require symbols (like greek letters), which aren’t easy to type by default. Also, people have been practicing all year by handwriting responses (since we didn’t know it would be online, obviously) - so a handwritten option is accommodating that.
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1. mywittyname ◴[] No.23263114[source]
This brings back horrible memories of the janky-ass software we used in calculus for our exams. It took probably 10x longer to answer a question with the GUI because of the symbols and half the time they'd be marked wrong because the system couldn't handle equivalent variations of the correct answer.

I doubt things are much better today. This was probably the "low-tech" solution to a decade+ of dealing with the above problem.