Article 2 in the “Educating in the Age of AI” Series

What’s Old Is New Again… And That’s the Problem

The Blue Book is making a comeback. Yes, that little blue exam booklet that many of us (of a certain age) filled with frantically scrawled essay responses or algebraic equations during midterms and finals is having a renaissance—thanks to fears about AI.

Some colleges are reportedly bringing back the Blue Book as a safeguard against students using ChatGPT and other AI tools to cheat on take-home assignments or digital exams. On the surface, the logic seems simple: if we can’t stop students from using AI, we’ll just take them offline and back in time.

But here’s the question that keeps gnawing at me: Are we trying to fix the system and adapt to rapidly evolving technology… or just freeze it in place, stuck in a 150-year-old model of ‘memorize these facts and spit them back to me on a test’ so I can grade whether you’ve learned something?

The Blue Book Is a Symbol of Educational Inertia

Let’s be clear: I’m not nostalgic for Blue Books—I never liked using them. I remember them more for smudged ink, hand cramps, and cryptic professor comments than for any deep insight I managed to express in 45 minutes.

And it seems to me that the return of the Blue Book isn’t about nostalgia—it’s about avoidance.

When faced with disruption (like AI), our first instinct is often to fall back on what’s familiar, even if it was never ideal to begin with. The Blue Book represents a world where:
– Information was scarce, so memorization mattered.
– Learning was measured by how much you could write under pressure.
– Thinking fast was more valued than thinking well.

That world is gone. Today, we live in a world of:
– Instant access to information… anytime, anywhere, on any device.
– AI tools that draft, analyze, summarize, and even ideate.
– Complex problems that require collaboration, discernment, creativity, and deep questioning.

Bringing back the Blue Book doesn’t future-proof education. It past-proofs it.

“Doing School” vs. Real Learning

This is part of a bigger problem I’ve observed—what some educators call “doing school.”

Students learn to play the game:
– Give the teacher what they want.
– Memorize just enough to pass the test.
– Forget most of it in a few days and head to that night’s party.

That was my educational model all the way through graduate school and earning an MBA. Sure, it got me the degree—back when an MBA was becoming a white-collar union card. But did the ‘just pass the test’ model really prepare us for life?

Today, none of the memorized knowledge from my academic years holds any real relevance—except maybe one semester of typing, which itself is rapidly becoming obsolete thanks to voice tech.

Today’s students don’t just need to know what—they need to know how, why, what matters, and what’s next. AI tools can help them ask better questions, test hypotheses, and explore new perspectives—but only if we stop treating technology like a cheat code and start treating it like a co-pilot. (No pun intended, Microsoft.)

The View From the Sidelines… and the Front Lines

As a grandparent and longtime coach to business leaders, I’ve watched with increasing concern as we send our kids into a future we’re not preparing them for.

We’re giving them 20th-century tools while asking them to navigate a 21st-century world—and then we wonder why they’re disengaged, anxious, or tempted to cheat.

But here’s the thing: they’re not the problem.
The system is. And it’s overdue for reinvention.

What If We Upgraded the Toolset Instead?

Imagine an approach to education that treats exams not as final judgments but as learning opportunities:
– Replace Blue Books with multimedia project portfolios.
– Grade students on how they use AI to gather, evaluate, and challenge ideas—not just regurgitate them.
– Encourage prompts like: “Ask ChatGPT a question. Now critique the response. What would a human need to add?”

These approaches wouldn’t just reduce cheating—they’d make cheating irrelevant. Because the goal wouldn’t be to replicate knowledge. It would be to create understanding.

From Reflex to Reflection

Let me be clear: I have deep respect for teachers at all levels. I know how hard they work and how little support they often receive. The point isn’t to blame educators. It’s to challenge all of us—parents, policymakers, grandparents, and yes, the students themselves—to reflect before we react.

We can’t Blue Book our way out of the AI era.
But we can think our way forward—if we’re willing to leave behind the tools that no longer serve the task.

What’s Coming Next

In the next article in this series, we’ll explore what it might look like to “rewrite the test”—rethinking assessments to reward thinking, not just typing speed or recall. And we’ll spotlight some teachers who are already doing this.

If this article resonated with you or reminded you of your own school experiences, I’d love to hear your story.

– Were Blue Books ever a part of your academic life?
– What did they measure—or miss?
– How should we measure learning today?

Let’s keep the conversation going. Our kids are depending on it.

Author: Ben Griffin

Facilitator - CEO Peer Advisory Group; Executive Coach; Photographer