The Blue Books Are Coming Back

Last Sunday the Washington Post ran an opinion piece by Santiago Schnell, the provost of Dartmouth and a mathematician by training. His argument, in a single line: a degree should distinguish what students can do on their own from what they can do with the help of a machine. His example: the University of Chicago Law School will pilot, this fall, a prohibition on electronic devices in its core first-year classes.¹

The piece appears in a week in which Inside Higher Ed reported that at least a dozen elite institutions, among them Yale, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Georgetown, and NYU, have disabled Turnitin's AI-detection feature entirely. The reason cited was reliability. The consequence, at the same schools, was a scramble. In the absence of a detector, the assessment itself has to become the instrument. What is coming back, in its place, is a nineteenth-century form. Blue books. Oral defenses. Proctored exams under fluorescent lights.²

Two Retreats

Both moves are honest. The first, the abandonment of detection, is the acknowledgement that a probability score printed on top of a page cannot adjudicate a student's honesty. The tools were unreliable. They misfired against non-native English speakers. They put teachers in the position of prosecuting on the strength of a black box.²

The second, the return of the blue book, is the acknowledgement that a paper turned in on Sunday night, after seventy-two hours in front of a chat window, may not be evidence of anything a student did herself. The instrument that worked was the room. A student, a pen, a blank page, a proctor, and the walls of a small building.

Both are retreats from an intermediate era. Both are, in their way, defensible. The universities that made them did what a serious institution has to do when its old measurement is broken. They went back to something they trusted, which was the sight of the student in the room.

What The Room Still Cannot Show

The blue book restores presence. It does not restore process. A student writing an essay in seventy-five minutes under a proctor's eye is producing a different artifact than the one she produces at midnight in her dorm. But both are artifacts. The essay she writes in the blue book is still the finished page. It tells you very little about the hour it took her to write it, whether she paused for eight minutes on the second paragraph, whether the argument she landed on was her third try or her first. The blue book solves the authorship question. It leaves the learning question about where it was.

An oral defense reveals more. The student sits in a room, answers questions, walks the professor through the reasoning. It works. It is also expensive. Ten students take an hour. Two hundred take a week. The universities piloting oral defenses this fall are, quietly, the ones with the budget for it. The ones without will assign the blue book and hope it is enough.

The Third Path Nobody Bought

There is a third answer to the question the detector was meant to answer, and it does not appear in the Post opinion piece or the Inside Higher Ed report. It is the one the vendors did not sell in 2023, because it did not demo well, and the one the schools did not fund in 2024, because it had no line on a purchase order. It is the layer underneath the artifact. The record of the process itself. The pauses. The revisions. The word chosen and then unchosen. The sentence pasted in from another window and, sometimes, rewritten in the student's own hand.

The blue book cannot capture this. The oral defense can, once, for one student, at high cost. The detector was never trying to. What captures it is a writing environment that stays awake with the student while she works and that leaves a legible trail behind her. Not a percentage score. A record.

What Fall Will Ask

At Koan we spend our days on that third path. The universities that thrive over the next five years, we suspect, will not be the ones that fastened themselves most tightly to the blue book, or the ones that lasted longest with the detector. They will be the ones that quietly built, or bought, or borrowed the ability to see a student's thinking as it happens. Not to catch her. To know her.

The dean at Chicago Law is right that a first-year student should be able to work through a case with a pen. The provost at Dartmouth is right that a degree should mean something the student did herself. What neither man has said out loud, yet, is that the room is not the only way to know what the student did. The room is the answer a university reaches for when it is out of instruments. The next instrument is being built now, in quieter offices, and it will not look like a proctor.

If your institution replaces the detector with a blue book, what has it learned to see that it could not see before?