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 ...
#82 This person writes like a machine.
How to Write Neatly + Improve Your Handwriting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QA_NScPlt8
The music is catchy as well
I use the free 4K Video Downloader Plus then copy the web address at Youtube then download to my Desktop.
https://www.4kdownload.com/products/videodownloader-42
Blue Sky Over Hawaii
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njc7ASI1Cx4
Same with Entry Level Positions
I had a college professor who gave my class a list of 12 possible essay questions two weeks before finals and listed 5 of them for his final blue book test.
You could get an A on each essay if you mastered all 12 questions during the two weeks. I recall 3 blue books were involved.
Many of them believe students should be using AI to get smarter.
No way in hell that happens...they will become lazy[lazier?] and dependent, still unable to do anything themselves.
What will be the point of them if AI does everything for them?
Sadly, the lazy teachers would just use AI to grade the Blue Books...
I filled up a lotta blue books!
Professors don’t like them because they have to actually ‘read’ the answers to grade the work
You know, when you cut pictures out of magazines and then rearrange and glue them onto cardboard to make a whole new picture.
Many a day I could be seen walking to class with a bluebook, sporting my raccoon coat and ukulele.
I always liked essay questions. I got graded on how well I knew the subject not on a couple of details I may have got wrong.
I worked for Radio Shack at the time of this add. I probably owned half the stuff on the page.
The dual cassette answering machines were great…when they worked….
When I was a sassy high schooler, my history teacher was the head baseball coach on the trail for the championship. He was just going thru the motions in class. By spring, he knew the basic performance level for each student.
We were assigned a theme and began writing.
I knew he was not going to read it. My grade was already locked in.
In my best cursive penmanship, I loaded my paper up with every grammatical error I could think of, cited quotes that didn’t exist, made contradictory statements.
Sure enough, I received an A-
Such wicked fun.
(We didn’t make the playoffs)
I wanted a 41-C (41-CV?) but IIRC it came out not long after I’d bought that 15-C and I just couldn’t talk myself into it.
I teach a creative writing class in a private setting. Most students were from either a home education or private school setting. However, three were former public school students.
None could construct properly formatted papers. Two could not construct proper sentences.
Project assignments included journalistic articles, advertisements, short stories, fantasy stories, research papers, and various essays.
One student from public school turned in one assignment out of twelve. She then dropped the class. The other two students from public school both turned in AI papers.
Of course, the students deny they use AI, but if one knows what to look for, AI writing is detectable. One student claimed she did NOT use AI to writhe her paper. She came up with the ideas and then used Grammarly for the words to help make it more official. The problem with this is programs like this offer not simply a thesaurus style word suggestion, but entire phrases.
Students use these programs and miss the focus of the project. The writing is overly descriptive with non-specific words and devoid of real human voice. I feel as if many of these public educated students are extremely poor readers and have not been exposed to truly great literature. It shows up in their lack of creativity and weak reading comprehension.
Ai generated music and writing is weak, repetitive, and lacks real human “voice.” I believe accepting AI generated coursework is simply dumbing down the next generation further.
likely student long hand is illegible.
Sadly, it is no longer what you know, but if you know how to access and apply the knowledge.
What a worthless article!
Several hundred words about “Blue Books” that fails to deliver even a single sentence telling a reader what “Blue Books” are and how they are used.
The author is a “fly in a bubble”.
Remembering when I was going through Naval Nuclear Power School in the 1980’s, exams were all essay questions. You had to know the subject matter. It was the equivalent of three years of engineering school in a six month period. The attrition rate for my class was almost 45% with just over 400 graduates. I was among the top 20.
Any time a thread like this comes up, I'm always reminded of the sci-fi short story "The Feeling of Power" by Isaac Asimov.
The Feeling of Power by Isaac Asimov
In Isaac Asimov's short story "The Feeling of Power," a future society that relies entirely on computers for all calculations has lost the ability to perform basic arithmetic. A technician named Myron Aub rediscovers and teaches the principles of "Graphitics," or paper-and-pencil math, which is then taken by the military to re-engineer the war effort with more expendable, human-crewed missiles instead of expensive computers.
Cursive is obsolete.
They have no need to write cursive simply because they don’t need to write
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