Do teachers prefer grading papers or something? This always seemed like the obvious answer and there are no shortage of complaints. There is something making papers "sticky" that I do not understand. Education needs to be agile enough to change it's assessment methods. It's getting to the point where we can't just blame LLMs anymore. Figure out how to asses learning outcomes instead of just insisting on methods that you assumed should work.
Oral exams and quizzes are hard for reasons unrelated to understanding the subject matter. Language barriers, public speaking anxiety, exam stress, etc. All things that students should hopefully learn how to overcome, but that's a lot to ask a teacher to deal with in addition to teaching history or whatever. With a paper, a student can choose their own working environment, choose a day and time when they are best able to focus, have a constructive discussion with the teacher if they're having trouble midway through the work, and spread their effort (if they want to) across more than an hour-long test or 5-minute oral exam. In an imaginary world where they couldn't cheat, a paper gives the teacher the best chance of evaluating whether a student understands the material.
I don't think you're wrong necessarily, but there are good reasons that teachers like papers other than "we've always used them".
> Oral exams and quizzes are hard for reasons unrelated to understanding the subject matter. Language barriers, public speaking anxiety, exam stress, etc
People have some different challenges writing papers and taking oral and written quizzes, but is one way or the other necessarily easier? For writing papers, think about language barriers, anxiety about writing ability, stress of writing papers, need for self-motivation and time management, etc.
Because, assuming it's done properly w/o cheating, it's a great learning tool. It's sometimes easy to forget that certain tasks are the way they are because they're supposed to teach. We don't structure teaching and learning around what the least painful thing is.
>Because, assuming it's done properly w/o cheating
But that's what we are solving for. So you can't assume it.
This is what I mean when I say educators need to be more agile instead of insisting on assessment methods they simply assume should work.
How wide is the gap between “least painful thing” and “most effective thing”?