Oh, the article is mostly an ad for that Roaring Spring paper company.
But anyway, addressing the development per se: I think it's a great thing, but I'm skeptical it can survive for very long, as it's flatly incompatible with admin's goal of growing student headcount as high as they can get it.
This article somehow doesn't manage to explain the difference between "blue books" and "blank paper". Is there one?
An ordinary math exam, say, is printed on some 8.5" x 11" paper and then filled in with the writing tool of your choice. What would be different if it was in a little bound booklet?
What were people supposedly doing before blue books made their comeback?
It's not a replacement for a math exam, it's a replacement for an essay. You get some sources and a topic and have an hour or two to write an essay, by hand in the exam room. The alternative being to have the proper time to think and research and then submit your essay in Canvas or whatever.
"Worst nightmare" is hyperbole but they were certainly my least favorite exams.
Writing an essay by hand in the exam room is also the norm for a final exam.† The term used at my high school was "in-class essay", and they weren't rare. At no point did anyone feel the need to use paper that was bound. Paper is paper.
(I can't really speak to college; I didn't take classes that required essays.)
I always loved in-class essays as an alternative to take-home essays, since the demand on your time is zero instead of "lots".
† A final paper, in contrast, would be written in advance. Usual practice would be to have the paper and the exam. Is the article really saying "schools have started giving exams again"?
My biggest problem with them was that they were painful, my hand would start cramping and such.
I think the benefit of it being bound is a.) they don't want you to use your own paper because it might give you an opportunity to cheat and b.) if 100 students turn in loose leaf essays you're liable to lose a few pages. But that's just my speculation.
The significance of blue books is that, in addition to being bound, they were handed out in class (and numbered) so you couldn't sneak in notes or pre-written pages.
I was fine with such exams from middle and high-school. I could formulate whole thing well enough in my head and then just write it down even with my poor handwriting in reasonable time. And get passable grade.
Never really got any dread, but maybe I just was not pressured to aim too high.
Sometimes the best way to respond to a question is to address it's premise, and I was more responding to the second question ("what were people doing before"), but see my later comment for a more direct answer.
I do not quite understand why these "blue books" were feared by anyone? I took exams in school/university and sure, sometimes we were nervous and ill-prepared but I do not think anyone feared paper. "Worst nightmare" seems rather hyperbolic.
The kind of people who go on to spend a life in journalism are mostly the same people who hated it when their final was to integrate 3/5 of the random integrals the professor put on the board.
I was listening to a (100x wiser than me person) saying on an interview that (I'm paraphrasing) "the disconnect between thinking and writing (brain+hand+fingers+pen+paper) is the thing that will lower intelligence and stupidify people". The guy was far gentler than how I wrote the previous sentence, but he went on to analyze how humanity's ability to 'grow' has exploded in comparison with the invention of writing (Harari's "Nexus" also speaks of this), and how "writing 10 words and getting 1000 back, and not even reading that" will make the (perhaps 'academic') part of people's brains 'poorer'/weaker.
Now we think the 'prompt' and the writing magically happens. No finger motion, not thinking each word and writing it down, no re-reading 3-4 times (as we check if our handwriting is readable), and so on.
When I heard that the image (Wall-e) of the fat people on board the spaceship, sitting, and consuming 24/7 (food, drinks, 'content' on their VR headsets). Full tech everywhere, everything they ever desired - they got, but fat, clumsy, unable to walk, in the mercy of even the tiniest of adverse circumstance.
> When I heard that the image (Wall-e) of the fat people on board the spaceship, sitting, and consuming 24/7 (food, drinks, 'content' on their VR headsets).
The people in Wall-E don't use VR headsets, at least not most of the time. Instead, images are projected onto thin air in front of their faces.
> Last year, Oklobdzija allowed his class to use laptops for exams so they could type responses and he wouldn’t have to decipher handwriting that looked more like hieroglyphics. He asked them to obey the school’s honor code and made them promise they wouldn’t use ChatGPT. Then one of his teaching assistants took a picture of a student using ChatGPT.
> “So,” he said, “blue books it is.”
A good compromise is the old fashioned, but still being made, typewriter [1] [2].
It is logistically a little more work to allow typewriters on exams because they are noisy. You generally need to separate the people who want to type from the people who want to hand write. A bit of a hassle but should be doable.
If you are ready to provide hardware, why bother with typewriter? Just provide school notebooks with locked-down OS which can only open exam website.
Does not even have to be any of the good ones. Something like an ancient Chromebook with locked-down managed enterprise profile would be _perfect_: it needs to be able to open exactly one website (the exam-taking one).
This will be significantly better than typewriters - quieter, more robust, does not need paper, easier to grade, etc....
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 58.2 ms ] threadBut anyway, addressing the development per se: I think it's a great thing, but I'm skeptical it can survive for very long, as it's flatly incompatible with admin's goal of growing student headcount as high as they can get it.
I guess, maybe, but how many English professors are reading the Wall Street Journal?
An ordinary math exam, say, is printed on some 8.5" x 11" paper and then filled in with the writing tool of your choice. What would be different if it was in a little bound booklet?
What were people supposedly doing before blue books made their comeback?
"Worst nightmare" is hyperbole but they were certainly my least favorite exams.
(I can't really speak to college; I didn't take classes that required essays.)
I always loved in-class essays as an alternative to take-home essays, since the demand on your time is zero instead of "lots".
† A final paper, in contrast, would be written in advance. Usual practice would be to have the paper and the exam. Is the article really saying "schools have started giving exams again"?
I think the benefit of it being bound is a.) they don't want you to use your own paper because it might give you an opportunity to cheat and b.) if 100 students turn in loose leaf essays you're liable to lose a few pages. But that's just my speculation.
Never really got any dread, but maybe I just was not pressured to aim too high.
There is no need to put a name on each page, just once at front is enough.
The blue books are sold in packs of 1, while paper is sold in packs of 100 or 500 (or I you can steal/take it from school printers I suppose...)
Other than that, pretty similar.
That said, the essay format was much worse than any multiple choice standardized test.
I am one of those people with deeply held opinions on what makes good stationery, this has never prevented me from writing on bad stationery.
Now we think the 'prompt' and the writing magically happens. No finger motion, not thinking each word and writing it down, no re-reading 3-4 times (as we check if our handwriting is readable), and so on.
When I heard that the image (Wall-e) of the fat people on board the spaceship, sitting, and consuming 24/7 (food, drinks, 'content' on their VR headsets). Full tech everywhere, everything they ever desired - they got, but fat, clumsy, unable to walk, in the mercy of even the tiniest of adverse circumstance.
The people in Wall-E don't use VR headsets, at least not most of the time. Instead, images are projected onto thin air in front of their faces.
> “So,” he said, “blue books it is.”
A good compromise is the old fashioned, but still being made, typewriter [1] [2].
It is logistically a little more work to allow typewriters on exams because they are noisy. You generally need to separate the people who want to type from the people who want to hand write. A bit of a hassle but should be doable.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Royal-79101t-Classic-Manual-Typewrite...
[2] https://www.staples.com/royal-consumer-scriptor-electric-typ...
Does not even have to be any of the good ones. Something like an ancient Chromebook with locked-down managed enterprise profile would be _perfect_: it needs to be able to open exactly one website (the exam-taking one).
This will be significantly better than typewriters - quieter, more robust, does not need paper, easier to grade, etc....