Singing the blue book blues

By: Greg Maresca

Students across the educational spectrum are outsourcing their work to Artificial Intelligence (AI), according to The Wall Street Journal. In other words, cheating is more widespread than ever. To counter this underhanded academic revolution, the professoriate is taking a page, or more appropriately, pages – from their analog days to solve an ongoing digital problem.

Enter blue books – the academy’s counter to the AI revolution. Blue books first made their appearance at Butler University in Indiana a century ago and represent the school’s colors of blue and white, leading to their time-honored name. In my salad days, the illustrious blue book was as much of the collegiate landscape as payphones, textbooks and typewriters.

In a world shaped by algorithms, bureaucracies and nonstop social media, the blue book is a welcomed and needed blast from the past. They are a constructive, yet inexpensive tool that consists of blank ruled pages waiting to be filled with knowledge obtained. In an era where computers and virtual schooling relegated the blue book to academia’s endangered list, its comeback solves a problem that didn’t exist until now.

Blue books were a longtime staple of the academic exam world particularly for subjects requiring written analysis. While their use declined with the rise of digital technology, they have seen a resurgence in recent times due to concerns about academic integrity.

Blue books will help combat AI-assisted cheating, making it easier for students to generate essays and answers. ChatGPT is perhaps the most formidable cheat apparatus to date. Over the past two summers with school out, ChatGPT’s traffic has markedly declined. Moreover, ChatGPT references Wikipedia proving that all things digital are anything but a scholarly, peer reviewed provenance underscoring why it is called “artificial” intelligence.

AI is anything but agnostic. AI is beholden to the bias of their programmers and their milquetoast drivel. Programming’s oldest adage applies – garbage in, garbage out. AI doesn’t think for you; it does other people’s thinking for you. Critical thinking skills are desperately needed in our era that is overwhelmed with an army of mendacious charlatans who ply lies for a living.

While this return to what was once considered a relic of the past helps prevent AI misappropriation in every sense. The triumphant return of blue books is part of a broader symposium about how to balance educational technology with genuine learning and critical thinking. They allow a student to demonstrate their knowledge in context and without digital assistance providing them with the opportunity to test their writing chops accompanied by the once common cursive penmanship that in recent times is greatly lacking.

To call most penmanship today chicken scratch would be an insult to chickens.

Such expression in their own words and in their own handwriting ensure academic integrity, while expressing the personality of the writer with a distinct human touch.

Blue books are an antidote for that compounded equation infecting campuses known as dumbed down plus group think equals grade inflation. Moreover, it is difficult to cheat on a handwritten, proctored exam.

Best of all it’s working as some universities have seen a surge in demand, with blue book sales increasing by 30% at Texas A&M, 50% at the University of Florida, and 80% at UC Berkeley.

Adding an oral assessment component to the blue book exam is something that has been suggested to ensure the student can verbally communicate cohesively and effectively what they have learned.

Teachers want their students to learn and succeed, not cheat their way to a diploma. Education is not just about gathering and regurgitating facts and figures. It is about critical thinking, analysis and creation.

Technology is a tool that makes life better, not a means to do your thinking for you.

The brain must be exercised.

The lack of critical thinking is our other national deficit growing at unprecedented levels.

Too often collegiate critical thinking means undermining objective reality when it conflicts with students’ emotions that are suffused nonstop with leftist ideology.

Like it or not, life is one big blue book.

Blue books are the first hopeful sign of common sense emerging from the academic quad in decades. Proving what’s old is still useful.

Perhaps fountain pens, textbooks and slide rules are next.