Writing code out by hand

I started teaching myself programming and I fucking love it.. So I decided well I might aswell take a course at university so that I have a really strong foundation to build on myself. It's such bullshit. They keep taking points off my assignment and giving me comments like "recursion hasn't been covered in class yet". SO fucking what? Now they want me to write an exam and write my code out by hand? Is that even possible? Are there ever any 'real world' scenarios where you would ever need to do that?

i write psuedo-code out by hand when i'm having a difficult time solving a problem.
well, actually it's real code. but it gives me an excuse to write things that don't compile