American students: blue book making a comeback

In 1857 a century and a half before Apple marketed iPads to schools, a Greece-born Harvard professor, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, held a bonfire of newly introduced “blue books”, bound exam booklets for pen-and-paper tests that (to his ire) were to replace oral recitation. He lost. These booklets would torment generations of American students before yielding in turn to computerised testing. But now the blue book is making a comeback, with booklet sales more than doubling from 2022 to 2024, according to Circana, a data firm. And oral exams appear ripe for revival too.

From high school to university, teachers are playing defence against classroom tech that enables cheating and foments distraction. Laura Lomas, a literature professor at Rutgers University, now requires students to attend a play whose ending changes every night, so she knows if they were there. She assigns oral presentations rather than more AI-friendly PowerPoints, and allows no bathroom breaks during blue-book exams so students can’t peek at their phones.

The reason is not just ChatGPT and the mass cheating it makes possible. Teachers are worried about mass distraction as well. In 2025, 56 percent of educators said laptops, tablets or desktops are a major source of diverted attention, according to an EdWeek Research Centre survey. At Bowdoin College, a private liberal-arts college in Maine, the dean says that “many faculty had already marked their classrooms as, for the most part, device-free spaces” even before “the recent ubiquity of AI”.

Rigorous studies have shown that classroom tech can help pupils learn algebra, but evidence of improved outcomes in other areas is thin. By contrast, the benefits handwriting offers for cognition are gaining new respect, even beyond the humanities. A computer science teacher at Hunter College High School in New York recently reinstituted handwriting for coding assignments because it helps with retention as well as critical thinking.

But not everyone who wants to go old-school can. Parents can’t easily opt out of edtech. And Derek Vaillant, a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan, says that while there is a consensus that teachers need to “get back to basics” by prioritising original, in-person, pen-and-paper exams, large public universities are not providing resources commensurate with the challenge by hiring enough teaching assistants. Administrators are “speaking out of both sides of their mouths”.

Purdue rejecting ‘adversary nation’ students

Current and prospective Purdue University graduate students say the institution rejected a slew of Chinese applicants from its graduate programs for this academic year. Also, one grad student says the university told admissions committees in the past couple of months that it’s highly unlikely to accept students from any “adversary nation” next year.

Faculty were told those countries are China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela, said Kieran Hilmer, a teaching assistant on the leadership committee of Graduate Rights and Our Wellbeing (GROW), a group trying to unionize Purdue grad workers. That list broadly matches the commerce secretary’s catalog of foreign adversaries.

Purdue isn’t commenting on the allegations. The university has faced scrutiny from members of Congress about its ties to China. In May, the Trump administration briefly said it would revoke Chinese students’ visas nationwide. The president has since changed his tune and said he would welcome more students from China.

A Chinese student who wishes to remain anonymous because he’s still trying to get into Purdue told Inside Higher Ed he received an offer to be a research assistant last February, meaning his funding was secure to become a Purdue grad student this academic year. But, in April or May, he said, the Office of Graduate Admissions told him that his application was denied. The redacted two-paragraph letter that he provided to Inside Higher Ed said admission “is competitive and many factors are carefully considered,” but “we are not able to provide specific feedback.”

If Purdue is responding to the committee’s pressure, it’s another example of a selective American institution bending to the federal government’s efforts to reduce international enrollment and to particularly target Chinese students and scholars. During President Trump’s first term in office, the Justice Department launched the controversial China Initiative, which investigated faculty ties to China.

Republicans say the initiative is sought to counter espionage, but Democrats, education lobbyists and Asian American advocates argued it is ineffective and instead justifies racial profiling and discrimination. A study suggested the initiative’s investigations may have caused valuable researchers of Chinese descent to leave the US for China.