How did people write University assignments before computers??!!

[XmisterIS]

I'm back at University the second time around (the first time I was very young, didn't realise the opportunity I had, and pissed the whole lot up against the wall).

Anyway, both times I've done all my assignments on the computer and I estimate that it takes me an average of four drafts before I churn out the final draft, with each one being tweaked, paragraphs slightly re-written, the structure shuffled about, diagrams tweaked here and there, etc.

It occurs to me that back in the dark ages before the modern PC, the production of University assignments must have been horribly laborious! I mean, what if you'd sat up all night doing it on a typewriter and you then decided that you didn't like a paragraph right in the middle of the essay?! That must have been a pain in the arse!

I used an electric typewriter once when I was a kid and it was a slow, cumbersome, flippin' nuisance! And the result looked crap compared to a PC printer ... even though that was back in the days of the Intel 386!

 

[Yellow Fang]

I remember writing my HND assignments on my Atari 500 (I think). What normally happened was that I'd just worked through the night to complete an essay. At about 5am the word processor would crash. Obviously, I would not have backed up.

 

[alecstilleyedye]

i think you wrote it all out and then found a typist who would type it up for a fee, at least for dissertations.

when i did my degree you could do that, but i'd discovered the apple mac…

 

[661-Pete]

The professor's secretary (bless her!) would type up theses and dissertations - for a price. Not sure what happened about formulas, diagrams, etc.: I think she just left a space and you were expected to put them in, longhand. Then of course you had to get busy with the Tippex. Then pay more to get it photocopied. And bound.

I never got that far. I mean, I dropped out without completing my postgrad. But I had a large part of my thesis written out in longhand, on the backs of computer printout paper. I don't know where it is now. It wasn't any good.

 

[jack the lad]

...and in the days before Wikipedia and 'cut and paste' you had to understand what you were writing about too!

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Back in the early 90s, my college at Oxford had a computer room, but it was inhabited mainly by scary-looking (and smelling) physics and engineeering postgrads, so you rarely went in there. We wrote all our essays by hand (one 10-20 A4 side piece every two weeks, at least, for each course you were doing), and then the tutor would savage them and make you rewrite them after the tutorial!

 

[threebikesmcginty]

...and in the days before Wikipedia and 'cut and paste' you had to understand what you were writing about too!

turnitin soon finds the cut 'n' pasters.

 

[jack the lad]

turnitin soon finds the cut 'n' pasters.

If only it were that simple! Turnitin never was fool-proof and it always lags behind as cheats develop ever more sophisticated methods.

 

[XmisterIS]

It seems that had I been born 20 years earlier, I simply wouldn't have had the opportunity to do another degree - assignment writing would have been so long and laborious (and we have to do lots of them on my course!) that I wouldn't have been able to fit it in and do my job (not without going nuts from lack of sleep, anyway!).

 

[phaedrus]

Every essay for my undergraduate degree was either handwritten or typewritten. Although it was a while ago now, I still have horrible memories of the experience together with a bony protrusion on my right index finger from so much writing. One in particular was when my wife was ill and I was right up against a submission deadline. In the early hours of the morning I was typing with one hand while trying to comfort a colic-smitten baby (my daughter) over my left shoulder.

Still, I got an A- for the essay, and I learned a lot about not leaving things until the last minute!

 

[GordonB]

Assignments were all hand written, using a fountain pen in my case, dissertations would be hand written then you'd pay a typist to do the final copy. For important assignments I used to write them out in soft pencil, making corrections as I went, then I'd go over it in pen and finally rub out the pencil. Yes, it took ages, as did the research - no internet (it wasn't even invented then!), no computer access at all in my case, you used the library, which was always packed and the book you really wanted was always out on loan. All searching for source material was done via card index then hunting down the book, only to find it was no good. Nightmare! Like many of my contempories, the library was my second home, and at least I didn't have to pay for the heating.

However, we didn't have tuition fees and in fact I got a grant to attend uni that covered much of my living expenses. Whilst I might envy the facilities students have at their disposal these days, I certainly don't envy the debt. Mind you, with two kids who will doubtless go on to further education in a few years I'll probably find out what it's like!

Gordon

 

[beanzontoast]

I used to make all my notes in 2B pencil on thin lined A4 pads, then handwrite the essays in ink on the same kind of paper. There was at least one department where if you made an error in ink doing the final version, you might as well chuck that sheet because they would not mark it if it came in with either the error or a tippexed correction.

 

[ColinJ]

My final year project write-up was about 60 sides of A4 and 20 circuit diagrams. I hand-drew the circuits on graph paper and wrote the text out long-hand in a notebook which was handed over to a typist who typed it out for £1 a page, including retyping any pages that she made mistakes on (and there were a lot of them, given how technical the content was).

As for research - there wasn't any World Wide Web or Google then. If I wanted to find out something, I read books!

Oh, and when I went to school we used slide rules and log tables. The first Sinclair calculator was produced when I was doing my 'O' levels in 1972 and cost a small fortune.

 

[jack the lad]

It seems that had I been born 20 years earlier, I simply wouldn't have had the opportunity to do another degree - assignment writing would have been so long and laborious (and we have to do lots of them on my course!) that I wouldn't have been able to fit it in and do my job (not without going nuts from lack of sleep, anyway!).

All that essay writing was good training for when you have to hand-write non-stop for 3 hours in an exam. I'm just not used to hand-writing anything longer than a post-it note anymore and it was a real struggle to keep going to the end when I had to do an exam for my OU course earlier this year. I'm glad I didn't have to try and read it!

 

[Yellow Fang]

It seems that had I been born 20 years earlier, I simply wouldn't have had the opportunity to do another degree - assignment writing would have been so long and laborious (and we have to do lots of them on my course!) that I wouldn't have been able to fit it in and do my job (not without going nuts from lack of sleep, anyway!).

I don't know. My father took an Open University degree in the 70s. He was given about 120 points credit for his teacher training certificate, equivalent to about a third of the degree, but he completed the other 240 points in two years. In effect, he was studying as hard as a full time student, as well as holding down a full time job. Come to think of it, I don't remember us seeing much of him during that time. He was studying sociology, so presumably he'd have been writing quite wordy essays. He got a 1st too.