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Entrepreneur
29-05-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
College Professors Turn Back to Blue Books to Combat ChatGPT
Sales of the product have increased by up to 80% at universities across the country. As college students use ChatGPT to complete take-home tests, finish homework and write essays, professors are using blue books, or inexpensive, stapled exam booklets with a blue cover and lightly lined pages, to ChatGPT-proof the classroom. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that demand is up for blue books, which cost 23 cents apiece in campus bookstores and were first introduced in the late 1920s. Blue book sales were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University, nearly 50% at the University of Florida and 80% at the University of California, Berkeley, over the past two years, the Journal found. Roaring Spring Paper Products, the family-owned business that manufactures most blue books, told the Journal that sales have picked up over the past few years due to AI use, as professors use the old-school books to conduct in-person exams in a classroom setting. The advantage of blue books is that students can't use ChatGPT and have to instead write their essays by hand under a professor's supervision. Related: College Professors Are Turning to ChatGPT to Generate Course Materials. One Student Noticed — and Asked for a Refund. Kevin Elliott, a Yale University lecturer in the ethics, politics and economics program, told WSJ that he switched from at-home essays to blue books in the spring semester when he realized students were using AI to write their assignments. He found that a few take-home papers included made-up quotes from famous philosophers, a clear sign of AI use. Elliott implemented a new system where students had to write essays in blue books for their final, and it worked so well that he plans to continue using blue books for the next academic year. Most college leaders think AI tools have led to widespread cheating. A survey released in January from the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University found that the majority of university leaders (59%) report that cheating has increased on their campuses since AI tools have become widely available. More than half of these leaders believe that their faculty cannot tell the difference between AI-generated work and student-written papers. Meanwhile, a January 2023 survey from of over 100 educators and 1,000 students found that nearly 90% of college students had used ChatGPT to complete a homework assignment, 53% had it write an essay and 48% had used it for an at-home test or quiz. More than 70% of college professors expressed concern about how ChatGPT could be used to cheat on assignments. Related: Hiring Managers Want Workers With ChatGPT Experience, New Survey Says Still, some professors who restrict ChatGPT use through blue book exams admit that students could benefit from knowing how to use the tool to be more productive when they graduate. Arthur Spirling, a Princeton University professor of politics, told WSJ that although he gives proctored blue book exams, he thinks it is a "strange" situation to limit ChatGPT use in the classroom when students will be able to tap into it when they begin working full-time. "It is strange to say you won't be permitted to do this thing that will be very natural to you for the rest of your career," he told the outlet. ChatGPT had 500 million global weekly users as of April, up from 400 million weekly users in February.
Wall Street Journal
27-05-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
They Were Every Student's Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back.
When this year's college graduates first arrived on campus, there was no such thing as ChatGPT. They had to use their own brains for math homework, econ problem sets, coding projects, Spanish exercises, biology research, term papers on the Civil War and the Shakespeare essay that made them want to gouge their eyes out. Now they can just use artificial intelligence. 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. The mere thought of that exam booklet with a blue cover and blank pages is enough to make generations of college kids clam up—and make their hands cramp up. But inexpensive pamphlets of stapled paper have become a surprisingly valuable tool for teachers at a time when they need all the help they can get. 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. And yes, I asked her if everybody makes jokes about Dunder Mifflin when they find out she works for a paper company in Pennsylvania. 'Nobody,' she said. 'It's weird—and it's sad. I love 'The Office.' ' Roaring Spring sells all the paper products you could possibly imagine: composition books with black-and-white marble covers, yellow legal pads and notebooks in every color, style and ruling. It also makes custom notebooks and folders with college logos, a crucial part of its business. But the most fascinating part of the company's latest catalog is page 63, where you can find more than a dozen products like Stock Item No. 77516: exam books with blue covers. There are blue books in different sizes, page counts and order quantities—and there are green blue books with recycled paper. Allen has a keen understanding of why colleges still want Roaring Spring's blue books. After all, she has children in high school. 'I thought people just used AI for big things,' she said. 'But no, they use it for everything. Which is pretty terrifying.' It also happens to be pretty good for business. This new golden age of blue books is not something that anyone would have predicted a few years ago, when remote school put them on the verge of extinction. But after sales tanked in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, they have picked up in recent years because of AI cheating. The company declined to provide specific numbers on its blue books, so I asked public universities across the country to pull data from their campus bookstores. 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%. Demand for blue books is suddenly booming again because they help solve a problem that didn't exist on campuses until now. It might feel like ChatGPT came out yesterday, but students who were freshmen when it was released in 2022 will be seniors next year. That means they've had access to the most powerful cheating machines ever made for basically their entire time in college. And they have come to rely on ChatGPT. One of the most remarkable things about the product's explosive growth is that ChatGPT traffic declined in each of the past two summers—when students were not in school. Only now are schools catching up. In math classes, students are being asked to leave their phones behind when they go to the bathroom during exams because OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini make calculators look like abaci. In humanities classes, professors who understand the mind-boggling capabilities of AI models don't bother assigning traditional papers anymore. 'It's a pointless exercise,' said Stan Oklobdzija, a Tulane University assistant professor of political science. 'It's like going to the gym and having robots lift the weights for you.' Not long ago, teachers could simply grade the words on the page. Now they can't be sure where those words came from. Kevin Elliott, a lecturer in the Ethics, Politics and Economics program at Yale University, learned this for himself in a seminar he taught this past semester, when he assigned a take-home essay and received a few papers with made-up quotes from famous philosophers. 'Smoking-gun evidence of AI,' he says. For their next assignment, he asked students to write essays and come to his office to discuss them, and those oral exams revealed which students really grasped the material. Then he busted out the blue books for their finals. The first part asked students to identify passages and explain their significance. If they see the phrase 'forced to be free,' for example, they should recognize that it's an idea from Rousseau and compare it with theories of Locke and Hobbes. The next part was an in-class essay. The students were given the prompt in advance so they could prepare, but they weren't allowed to bring their notes, which meant they actually had to think about how they would fill the empty pages. The only way to ace the test was to do the work themselves. It worked so well that Elliott is sticking with blue books next year. 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. 'They will use ChatGPT all the time for all sorts of things, and that will make them more efficient, more productive and better able to do their jobs,' said Arthur Spirling, a Princeton University professor of politics who gives proctored blue-book exams. 'It is strange to say you won't be permitted to do this thing that will be very natural to you for the rest of your career.' That's only one of the problems with blue books. Another is that absolutely nobody likes them. These bound paper booklets have been torturing both students and professors for as long as they have existed. In the 1800s, when Harvard University began requiring written final exams, a professor named Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles was so vehemently opposed to everything they represented that he staged a protest: He burned them unread. Prof. Sophocles may have been the first but he definitely was not the last person who felt the urgent need to light a blue book on fire. These days, there are students in college who were born after the iPhone. They aren't used to writing on paper—and it shows in their penmanship. To call it chicken scratch would be an insult to poultry. 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.' When he told his class this year, he was surprised by their reaction. 'The students didn't revolt as much as I thought they would,' he said. And before they cracked open Roaring Spring's blue books, they saw a phrase trademarked by the paper company on the cover: Use your imagination. Write to Ben Cohen at
