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.
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....
rwc9•8mo ago