Do AI detectors work? Students face false cheating accusations

I don't know what the rest of the world calls "cursive", but here in the US the cursive we get taught is strictly inferior: slower to write, less compact on the page, and harder to read (while also being strictly uglier than true calligraphy). It's a script designed for allowing you to avoid lifting a quill from the page and thereby avoiding ink blots; it's entirely obsolete.

This is a bit of an exaggeration.

I learned cursive, then reverted to print, but when I entered a phase of my life where I needed to write several pages a day I quickly went back to (a custom variant of) cursive because it was faster to write in a legible way than print.

When I rush print it quickly becomes illegible. When I rush my cursive it doesn't look quite as nice as it does when I'm writing steadily, but I can still read what I wrote ten years later.

From what I can tell it works because cursive letters are defined in a shape that lends itself to a quick moving pen. Once you learn that shape (both to write and read), you can quickly get words down on a page and then understand them later. If you just try to slur your print in an unprincipled way your letters distort in ways that make them harder to tell apart.

Now, I imagine someone could develop a slurred print that doesn't have connections between letters, but I'd probably call that a cursive anyway.

Write in cursive or in print, or even cut letter from a newspaper if you want. If you do it in a classroom in front of a teacher cheating is dramatically reduced

Yeah, the hand they taught us (in the early '90s) was some common one that I gather most places have taught in the US for decades. It never made any sense to me. Ugly, hard to read, and not even notably faster to write, even if you got good at it.

Later I found out it was developed for use with a fountain pen, designed with the idea that a correctly-faced nib would make some strokes bolder and others very faint, and to keep the nib always moving in a kind of flow to avoid spots, and to make it natural to keep the nib faced the correct way(s), plus with even more attention to avoiding raising the pen than most cursives, for similar reasons of avoiding spotting. That made all the downsides make sense—it's far less ugly and easier to read when written with a fountain pen, and may well be faster than many other similarly-clean methods of writing with one.

Why the hell we were still learning that hand decades into the dominance of the ballpoint, remains a question.