Byline: PAUL GRONDAHL Staff writer
Despite the Internet age and the promise of a digital revolution, the blue book is alive and well in the new millennium, as stubbornly durable amid the higher education landscape as the No. 2 pencil, class rings and tassels atop mortarboards.
So named for its powder-blue cover, the testing book is most commonly 11 inches by 8 1/2 inches, with 16 pages of wide-ruled 15-pound paper folded once and bound with two staples. It is a low-tech marvel.
The nation's roughly 14 million college and university students will consume an average of 1 1/2 blue books per capita this year, including a bumper crop each May.
For college alumni of any generation, the thought of a blue book -- pages curling up like dried leaves under the feverish scribbling of a ballpoint pen in between furtive glances at the classroom clock -- is enough to produce a cold sweat.
``My memories of the blue book are of suffering through a final exam on a hot spring day, trying to figure out how to fill the damn thing up,'' says Mike McDermott, manager of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute bookstore.
Those who administer the exams hold a different viewpoint.
``I've always used a blue book because it's an anti-cheating device, and it's got a particular texture that makes exams easier to read and keep track of,'' says Richard Hamm, associate professor of history at the University at Albany. Professors hand out blank booklets at the start of the exam and collect them at the end. Hamm's students in a 300-level course typically fill up one, two and even three in a two-hour essay final.
Despite the widely held student belief that quantity trumps quality when it comes to blue book exams, ``Being prolific doesn't guarantee a good grade, I'm afraid,'' Hamm says.
Charlie Hague, a dean of blue book salesman, says, ``Blue books have been around forever, they never change and sales have held steady with slight growth recently.'' Hague, the president of International College Sales in South Hadley, Mass., has active accounts with about half of the country's 4,000 college and university campus bookstores.
``Blue books sell themselves, but we get these panic calls this time of year from colleges saying they've got finals next week and no blue books,'' Hague says. ``The students would probably be happy if we didn't fill the order, but we can usually bail out a school.''
Although laptop computers have spelled the decline of the blue book at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy and other tech-centric schools, demand has remained steady for the exam booklets used for the better part of the 20th century.
Supplying the demand: An estimated 25 million blue books will roll off the presses this year at a handful of U.S. manufacturers who still produce the specialty items. They wholesale for a few pennies apiece. Most will be sold through campus bookstores, says Jim Lucey, director of operations for Roaring Spring Blank Book Co., the blue book market leader.
Workers produce them year-round in three shifts at the Pennsylvania paper products firm to meet demand. ``It's holding steady and if technology ever does make the blue book obsolete, it's going to take a long time because change comes very slowly in higher education,'' Lucey says.
He says its staying power is driven by price. ``It's the cheapest way of putting a small blank booklet together.''
However, orders for blue books have been on the wane in recent years at Union College in Schenectady, says bookstore manager Eli Majlaton, a 40-year veteran of college bookstore sales.
At RPI, where freshman are required to have a laptop, the future is already here. Students plug in their laptops during class and submit final papers or exams electronically.
McDermott says blue book sales at the RPI bookstore have dropped dramatically in recent years, from 10,000 or more a decade ago to barely 1,000 a year.
``I get a certain pang of nostalgia remembering going home to grade a big stack of blue books and gazing at them longingly and thinking of the torture that went into the students' filling them,'' says John Tichy, chair of the mechanical and aeronautical engineering department at RPI.
``I haven't seen a blue book since high school,'' says Frank Tobias, an RPI junior from East Orange, N.J., who submitted two final exams last week, a nine-page take-home test for a math course and a six-page typed management final.
Tobias says he's not even sure if he could interface with a blue book anymore.
``Since nobody writes, our handwriting has gotten so bad we'd all end up writing like doctors,'' says Tobias. ``I haven't practiced penmanship since probably third grade. Cursive is pretty much a lost art on college campuses today.''
The drop-off in the college market has been more than offset with sales of blue books to prep schools, high schools and even elementary schools, according to Hague.
``It's still a scramble to keep blue books in stock this time of year,'' says Hague, who often fills orders of 150,000 and up for large campus bookstore chains.
``I'm glad that they're still popular as far as my business goes,'' he says. ``But I've got painful memories of trying to fill them up for my psychology and English Lit courses.''
A `friendlier' look: That's why Linda Stanhope, chair of the psychology department at Union, spares her students. ``Just the sight of blue books made me anxious as a student,'' Stanhope says. ``I print out my final exam questions with space for my students' answers. I think it just looks friendlier that way.''
``I still think a blue book exam measures a student's complete knowledge by forcing them to write essays and back up their answers with examples from the coursework,'' Hamm says. ``I plan to keep using them.''
As for the blue book's history, it's as murky as an ill-prepared undergrad's final exam answers. The same type of booklet has been used in final exams at U.S. colleges since at least the 1920s and probably earlier.
``I've done some checking and nobody seems to have any knowledge of how the thing evolved,'' says Roaring Spring's Lucey.
When Lucey gives tours of the Pennsylvania plant, one stop invariably gets a reaction. ``I've noticed that when people walk past the machine that makes the blue books, they tend to cringe and look a little sickly,'' he says.
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