A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons

A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons Once a semester, a Cornell University instructor requires her students to complete an in-class assignment using typewriters -- an exercise to help them understand what writing, thinking and classrooms were like before everything turned digital By JOCELYN GECKER AP education writer March 31, 2026, 12:04 AM The scene is right out of the 1950s with students pecking away at manual typewriters, the machines dinging at the end of each line. Once each semester, Grit Matthias Phelps, a German language instructor at Cornell University, introduces her students to the raw feeling of typing without online assistance . No screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers or delete keys. The exercise started in spring 2023 as Phelps grew frustrated with the reality that students were using generative AI and online translation platforms to churn out grammatically perfect assignments . “What’s the point of me reading it if it’s already correct anyway, and you didn’t write it yourself? Could you produce it without your computer?” said Phelps. She wanted students to understand what writing, thinking and classrooms were like before everything turned digital . So, she found a few dozen old manual typewriters, in thrift shops and online marketplaces, and created what her syllabus simply calls an “analog" assignment. It might be premature to say that typewriters are making a comeback beyond Cornell's campus. But the revival is part of a national trend toward old-school testing methods like in-class pen-and-paper exams and oral tests to prevent AI use for assignments on laptops. Students arrived for class on a recent analog day to find typewriters at the desks, some with German and some QWERTY keyboards. “I was so confused. I had no idea what was happening. I’d seen typewriters in movies, but they don’t tell you how a typewriter works,” said Catherine Mong, 19, a freshman in Phelps' Intro to German class. “...