Posted on 05/25/2025 3:57:36 PM PDT by DoodleBob
…Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it.
It’s called a blue book.
…
All of which explains how a paper company in Pennsylvania has unexpectedly found itself on the front lines of the classroom AI wars.
Most blue books for sale in campus bookstores and on Amazon for 23 cents apiece are made by Roaring Spring Paper Products. The family-owned business was founded more than a century ago in Roaring Spring, a small borough outside Altoona that has become the blue-book capital of America. The company now sells a few million of these classic exam books every year and all of them are manufactured in the U.S., said Kristen Allen, its vice president of sales and marketing.
…
Sales of blue books this school year were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University and nearly 50% at the University of Florida. The improbable growth was even more impressive at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the past two academic years, blue-book sales at the Cal Student Store were up 80%.
…
But even professors who have gone analog to defeat the latest technology are deeply conflicted about it. Many of them believe students should be using AI to get smarter. It would be stupid not to. These tools will be a part of their lives and knowing how to use them effectively will be an important advantage in their future workplaces.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Oral Exams should also come back.
They have to cheat they pushed these failures through the system starting in elementary school
These days, “educated” kids often cannot write in cursive. They are at least partially illiterate.
Great news ! I used many a “blue book” in my university years. I was very good at writing and creating comprehensive answers to mid-term and final exam questions.
To Hell with AI. Make the college kids demonstrate their understanding of the subject matter and award those with good writing the notoriety they deserve !
I received a Phi Beta Kappa Key because I worked hard and delivered the REAL goods in those blue books.
I never understood in K-12 why we had word problems in math.
Now, I know EVERYTHING is a word problem.
Same thing with exams…pretty much the way to solve any problem is via an oral exam.
Bring it on.
cant, liberals would say its racist, since most of their people cant speak basic English.
I used those in college in 1988.
Didn’t know they were out of fashion.
They need to come back.
Back in the day at MIT, we used blue books for exams in many disparate subjects!
AI had not been invented yet, so we had to use our minds and learn things! Under those conditions, David Hogg would have flunked out of Harvard!
I remember Blue Books very well.
I understood as a child that when you cheat, you are only cheating yourself.
At USC, it was not unheard of to use UCLA Blue Books, just for fun.
I was in like 2nd or 3rd grade and HP had just released a handheld device that could do math, not just normal math but square roots and it also would sin, and ask you to co-sin
how far have we come?
in any case the teachers banned us from using these unholy devices because it was possible that some of the parents could not afford to buy these devices and that would be very horrible and stuff, probably cause the teachers didn’t want to buy them, and they had to figure out the lowest common denominator by hand.
I decided to learn how to use a slide rule, and brought that to class for my next math test and almost got suspended cause I tried to fight for my right to rule the slide.
“oral exams”
Great idea.
Fakers are exposed in less than five minutes with those.
There seems to be a general consensus that AI (artificial intelligence) is the savior of our economy and more. Dan Bongino praised it as having the potential to reduce our national debt. The unknown factors of AI are yet to be seen. While it may be the holy grail, I think the opposite is true. Human nature being what it is, you see one result here.
Only with Cameron Diaz in a remake of Bad Teacher.
There are zillions of foreign students who passed Blue Book exams over the years.
I worked with people born outside of America who aren’t absurd.
Push the matter. Force the students to take the Blue Book exam. Wait for whining.
Then go on a Social Media rampage, claiming the whiners are bigots.
It’s time to move to offense.
This won’t catch on... because teachers are lazy. Imagine all of those exams to grade. Oral exams would take even more time.
Face it.... dumbing down is integrated in the process.
When I taught English lit and comp I had the students tell me about everything involved
Essay exams
Five paragraph essays
Etc.
They knew
This is the same argument for calculators.
And why so many can’t make change.
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