Remember Those Blue Exam Books?

F%$#, you're old!

If you do, then I need to invoke the Negasonic Teenage Warhead quote from Deadpool.  (It applies to me.

But less about me, and more about the fact that teachers are requiring that assignments be turned in handwritten in those little blue books, because it prevents people from cutting and pasting from AI programs.

Maybe I don't get this, but hand copying into the little blue books is still a lot easier than doing original work in those little blue books:

I’m waiting on a call back from someone at the Roaring Spring paper company in Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania that probably isn’t coming. I get it; they’re busy. As the school year begins, the biggest manufacturer of blue books in the United States is currently in very high demand. A new status quo of laptops and tablets seems to have made those flimsy, 24-page exam books with their robin’s-egg blue covers as obsolete as inkwells. Instead, blue books are being stockpiled by educators and institutions seeking ways to redirect students from the call of ChatGPT, Claude and other large language models willing and able to do everything students need.

Since the 2023 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, researchers have been scrambling to collect data on how many students are using AI regularly, what they’re using it for and how it’s impacting their education. In a May 2025 report, the Chronicle of Higher Education estimated that 86% of students in 16 countries use AI, 56% of American college students, and a whopping 92% of UK students. The year-over-year increase has been dramatic: A survey of K–12 students conducted in 2024 found that use of LLMs doubled since the year before. A study of 558 college students conducted by Intelligent revealed that three out of every four college students believe that using AI to find answers to test questions, write essays and summarize textbooks is cheating — and that about 69% do it anyway.

If the students thought that the educational industrial complex were about education, and not to provide credentials so that one can serve what Roosevelt (Teddy) called the, "Malefactors of Great Wealth," maybe there would be less of this.

If all education is good for is that piece of paper at the end, then cutting corners does not matter.