HN turned a typewriter assignment into a debate about proof of thinking

Community Spark

Hacker News #47818485 drew 468 points and 417 comments after an AP story, republished by Sentinel Colorado, described a Cornell University German language instructor bringing manual typewriters into class. The easy read is nostalgia. The reason HN stayed with it was sharper: if AI-written work can arrive grammatically clean, how should a class prove that a student actually did the thinking?

What Happened

Grit Matthias Phelps started the analog assignment in spring 2023. Once a semester, students write in German without screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers, or delete keys. The article describes the March 20, 2026 classroom scene: students feeding paper into old machines, typing slowly, marking mistakes by hand, and asking classmates for help when the usual digital aids disappeared.

The exercise is not an AI detector. It is closer to a process test. Phelps wanted students to feel what writing becomes when correction is expensive and every sentence has to be held in mind a little longer. Students in the story described the absence of notifications, search, and instant cleanup as a real change in how they approached the assignment.

Why HN Cared

The HN thread quickly widened beyond typewriters. Several commenters argued that proctored handwritten exams have always been part of technical education, including computer science, and that AI-proof assessment is not a new invention. Others pushed back from the humanities side: a research paper is not just an answer, but a sustained argument built against sources, and that cannot be replaced cleanly by an in-class blue-book exam.

Another practical branch asked whether modern tools already expose process. Google Docs and similar editors can preserve revision history, paste events, and the life of a document. That may be a better fit than returning every assignment to paper. Still, the thread’s core point was not “bring back typewriters.” It was that final polish has become a weak signal. If education still values struggle, revision, and the ability to explain a path, assignments need to capture that path directly.