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 ...
The problem with oral exams is that they automatically punish shy people, who otherwise are often the smartest people in the room- and a lot of talent would be lost.
It would be like expecting someone without hands to have fine penmanship.
I suppose if there were equal weight placed on oral vs written then it would give a better estimation of knowledge and comprehension. Usually the people who are better orally aren’t as gifted at writing.
Literally stunned by the number of people suggesting oral exams. Oral exams open the door for the instructor to grade upon whether they like your voice, whether you sound like a hot blond or the dweeby nerd from “Revenge of the Nerds.” The professors I know in hard sciences and graduate schools all say they just want anonymous work-product. They really just want to grade what’s on the paper.
At the same time, I’m told that there are standard software packages that will let students just type without access to the internet and also without the professor having to decode their handwriting. Every prof I know other than a few in social sciences type fields desperately wants *NOT* to know anything about the person answering the question.
AOC says she can’t read the Constitution because it’s all written in cursive ...forgetting of course that ...
WSJ kidding themselves.
My cell phone doesn’t do so well with AM radio.....
Blue books at my school were free. Stacks of them would show up outside rooms where exams were held. Many of us grabbed a big bunch and would use them for homework problem sets.
I never understood in K-12 why we had word problems in math.I didn't go to college but I did learn multiplication tables from a Pee Chee folder up to 12x12.
I still know them and use them to this day.
As a result, I can do math in my head faster than you can punch the numbers in a calculator.
bkmk
GREAT Movie.
I am a retired manufacturing engineer who started using cnc machines in the mid 70’s. The technology allowed me to control precision production in a way that was amazing. Retired, I now use different AI’s for different purposes. For coding, i use one AI, for fictional story development , whether a book, short story , or script dialogue, I use and AI. another one helps me develop soundtrack music and songs. I develop images for green screen backgrounds with an AI. They increase my creative throughput enormously. However they will provide false information, tell you what you want to hear, and play loose if you don’t know your subject and have enough language skills to delineate strong boundaries for the output. They are a future fact, and knowing how to use them effectively needs to be a course, just like JCL, COBOL, Fortran, and basic were courses at one time.
I remember those days...
I took a graduate parasitology course in the 70s.
The instructor was an M.D. who came from
Walter Reed....what incredible stories...
He gave blue book exams. We were either given the scientific name or the common name of the organism and we had to write everything we knew about it.
Most difficult and most interesting class I ever had.
Still have my HP-15C (it’s 40 years old now) and use it regularly. RPN forever!
My cousin’s husband was project manager for that HP hand held calculator, the HP39. I asked him why it was named the HP39 and he said that it had 39 keys!
You mean they will actually have to learn something and write intelligible sentences and paragraphs? The horror!
and big chief tablets and fat pencils for the first graders.
And why so many can’t make change.
I just had a flashback.
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