Bonnie Morris requires her history students at the University of California, Berkeley, to buy 25-cent blue books for her midterm exams.
She wants to be able to see them write in person, often an anomaly on campuses, where typed assignments and assists from artificial intelligence are routine.
The squat booklets, once a regular part of the college experience for Gen Xers and baby boomers, have become less used over time. But the years since the pandemic have seen renewed interest among some educators for scribbled answers between powder blue covers. The approach challenges students, thwarts cheating, and shows where skills need improving.
Why We Wrote This
An old-school method of testing – the blue book – was on the rise even before the advent of generative artificial intelligence. The years since the pandemic have seen renewed interest as a way to thwart cheating and make sure students are thinking for themselves.
“If I give a blue book essay, I’m actually asking people to do something that’s not familiar,” Dr. Morris says. “When everyone is now used to typing on a keyboard, suddenly being asked to switch to writing by hand for a lot of people, that slows them down.”
Oral debate and the Socratic method governed university teaching in Europe and the United States for hundreds of years. Written exams in the U.S. date back to Harvard University, which started requiring them in the 1850s. Blue books are thought to have been created at Butler University in Indianapolis in the 1920s.
That was decades before AI’s use – both condoned by professors and not – was on the rise. In its wake, some educators have decided to seek a more old-school method of collecting students’ answers. They say the influence of technology is obvious in work that’s handed in.
“With longer papers, last year, I did see a kind of similarity, which suggested people use ChatGPT to set up their paper,” Dr. Morris says. She noticed telltale signs: “They had the same subheading. They were divided into sections when I didn’t ask for it, and the sections looked like somebody had told them how to title them.”
In November, the University of Minnesota expelled a student for the alleged use of AI. A third-year Ph.D. student was a health economics doctoral candidate until he was accused of using the software on a preliminary exam, which he had to pass in order to start writing his dissertation. He says our faculty members expressed concern that he used a large language model like ChatGPT or Gemini and that the words were not in his voice. He says he was let go after a university disciplinary hearing, and is suing the school, alleging that his due process was violated, and suing a professor, alleging defamation.
Sorting out AI’s influence on assessment may come down to teaching students how to use it. One advocate for tech education says AI is bringing major change, likening it to the printing press and electricity in its potential to change society. In an Instagram reel, futurist Sinéad Bovell has implored academia to meet the moment and adapt to the future – encouraging educators to change how they test for knowledge and redefine what knowledge looks like.
“If we don’t recognize the magnitude of the moment we’re in and what’s required of us, kids in college today are going to step out into that world and get steamrolled,” Ms. Bovell says in the reel.
Written by a human or AI?
Political science professor Philip Bunn contends that blue books, which he uses in all of his classes, are good for giving assessments on materials that he has gone over with students. However, they have limits. Simply put, they don’t address the broader issue of students relying on AI for research and writing.
“I call myself an AI pessimist in the sense that I don’t like what it’s doing to us,” says Dr. Bunn, who teaches at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, and wrote an essay, “Blue Books Will Not Save Us,” concerned about the mental degradation that occurs when people outsource their thinking. When AI first came out, he criticized it for how sloppy it was. Today, it is better with nuance than he expected, to the point where it is getting harder to tell whether the work is from an actual student or technology.
“So what I am experiencing right now kind of across the board, whether I see it on social media or my students in the classroom, are a lot of people who are sort of fully offloading their intellectual faculties onto these generative AI tools,” he says. Rather than learning to think for themselves, they can have paragraphs ready at the click of a button.
“Any way you have to stop students from using it, I think is probably good,” he adds. “Because if they use it, it does the job really well and can fully substitute for their brain on most of our assignments.”
The Alumni Association of the University of Michigan believes in blue books so much that it provided more than 8,500 for students this school year.
“We offer students two blue books a semester as we want to support students while they’re on campus,” Rob Clendening, vice president for marketing and communications at the alumni association, says via email. Alumni providing blue books helps reduce financial strain and promote academic success, he adds.
Old-school methods
Dr. Morris, who enjoys writing by hand in her personal life (215 journals and counting), says she is keeping her blue book midterm. She used to administer multiple in-person writing exams in a semester, but now only requires the one. She says it helps with skills that students are increasingly struggling with, such as structuring and expressing their thoughts.
When students arrive without a booklet, she staples loose-leaf paper together for them to write on. She gives three questions and 30 minutes to answer each prompt.
“I have to say that this past year, for the first time in a really long time, I had students who were actually rude,” Dr. Morris says. They complained about not getting A’s, so students changed from letter grades to pass/fail for her class. One student accused her of poorly designing her midterm because he didn’t do well on a blue book exam. While some students do a nice job, others peter out after the first of the three prompts, she says. She has had to fail students.
Dr. Bunn occasionally hears students complain. To quell that, he announces his blue book exams at the beginning of every semester so there are no surprises. And he remains vigilant while students write – in block letters and not cursive – in their booklets.
“I keep an eye out, and I wander around. I know that students are incentivized to [cheat],” he says, “but it’s something that I try my best to discourage by just being there and looming and lurking.”
