The Blue Book Return

Most adult educators are losing their minds these days because they can’t figure out a way to test their young learners’ knowledge without risking those young learners using artificial intelligence to either aid in providing the answer or providing the answer in total.

Walt Hunter, a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University and a contributing editor at The Atlantic, recently reminded all of us about the timeless antidote to artificial intelligence-assisted alleged cheating –

The Blue Book.

What follows are excerpts from Hunter’s essay, printed in the September issue of The Atlantic:

“Across the faded blue covers of the exam books in my attic, I can trace the arc of my academic career. I can still see the grades I receive on tests in ‘The Meaning of Abstraction in Modern Art’ (A) and in Neurobiology (B-). Just the sight of the booklets is enough for me to feel the pressure to perform, to sculpt the contents of a semester’s worth of knowledge into some fresh shape. But by the time I became a college professor myself, in 2013, the blue book had begun to disappear. Why struggle to discern student penmanship, or risk misplacing a final exam in the trunk of one’s Subaru (to cite a completely hypothetical example), when tests, like everything else, can be administered on a laptop?”

“The coronavirus made every aspect of education virtual, but even after it abated, in-person final exams remained out of favor for many classes. Part of the reason was simply administrative – the challenge of finding faculty or graduate students to watch over the test-takers. But there was also a shift in how teachers appraised student learning. The blue book meant timed essays and handwritten work, modes of assessment that felt regressive, cruel. It recalled an age of higher education – punitive and bleak, the domain of Dickens’s stern Mr. Gradgrind – that the modern university was eager to outgrow. Not entirely of course; some faculty still lugged boxes of blue books home in the snow and scribbled grades in red on the covers. But alternatives to the in-person exam proliferated: the capstone project, the take-home essay, the portfolio of selected work from the semester.”

“The blue book seemed destined to become a relic, as obsolete as cursive. But it had one virtue that hasn’t been easy to replicate: Cheating on a blue-book exam is difficult. When faculty moved away from in-person pen-and-paper exams, they assumed that cheating would be kept in check by honor codes, or by ‘locked’ browsers, which would prevent students from accessing sites that would jog their memory or simply give them the answers. But these measures were never wholly effective. In a survey of undergraduates published in 2020, 62 percent admitted to cheating in some manner.”

“The advent of AI has only exacerbated the problem. In a matter of seconds, students can create an entire essay with the help of a chatbot. If they’re savvy, they can spend a bit more time to make it sound authentically human enough to evade detection by their professor. As my colleague Rose Horowitch has reported, such cheating has become so prevalent that Princeton recently gave up on its venerable honor code. For 133 years, students had signed a pledge not to cheat, and professors had trusted them to do the right thing. In May, in the face of rampant AI-enabled cheating, the university’s faculty voted to begin proctoring exams for the first time since the Gilded Age.”

“Universities find themselves in a surprising position. The only reliable way to evaluate what students have learned may be to bring back pen and paper. Faculty are reverting to in-person, handwritten assignments and timed essays – anything that keeps assessments offline. The unlikely hero of the day is the blue book, sales of which are up by as much as 80 percent for some universities since 2023.”

Not being able to read the penmanship of the blue book’s author or losing a blue book in the trunk of an automobile weren’t the real reasons the blue book went away.

It has to deal with how universities undergraduate systems, and secondary public education systems for that matter, are structured. One professor, along with four to five teaching assistants, might be responsible for assessing the learning of 600 college freshmen. And even though that professor and teaching assistants read 600 blue books back when I was an undergraduate, you would be hard pressed to find a team of higher education instructors willing to do that today. Middle schools and high schools, within our current K-12 system, aren’t any better. One classroom teacher is responsible for assessing the learning of between 150 to 200 students.

That’s why the blue book, and assessing individual learner’s writing and knowledge skills, went away.

But maybe it’s time for the blue book to make its return. And along with it, maybe it’s time to rethink how we apportion secondary school students and college undergraduates to their adult learning leaders. Small liberal arts universities have assigned smaller classes for centuries, but many of those liberal arts colleges don’t have the huge administrative costs attached to running a larger university. So, maybe it’s time for the mega-universities to shrink their size, cut their classroom numbers, and allow their professors to lead learning – and assess learning – with a much smaller teacher to student ratio than currently practiced. Middle schools and high schools shouldn’t be immune to this transformation either.

It’s safe to say that, if you want legitimate information about whether a young learner has learned something or not, utilizing any type of technology touched by artificial intelligence won’t be the path to take.

Blue books might be the option moving forward, or we can do what Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato did – we can ask our young learners questions and assess the answers.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB