I am between semesters. During this so called ‘free’ time, I have to prepare the classes I will be teaching in the upcoming Spring Term which begins on January 12. Normally, I would just update what I have been using for several years. I would adjust the dates to reflect the start and due dates for the course and all assignments. If necessary, I would tweak the assignments that themselves to keep them fresh with current readings and examples.
For many years, I have gotten into a groove of assigning two papers and weekly discussions in my two semester long courses: Operations & Supply Chain Management and Principles of Microeconomics. For further homework and assessments, I use the following in these two courses.
- Operations: The course is structured around the Council for Supply Chain Management Professional’s (CSCMP) SCPro Certification program. The final exam in this course is the first of eight certification exams in the series: Supply Chain Management Principles.
- In this first overview course, we cover demand planning, procurement, inventory management, warehousing, transportation, manufacturing/service operations, customer service, and customer service.
-
To
supplement the management principles, there are 5 worksheets that involve the
formulae and calculations involved in forecasting, make vs buy decisions,
metrics, Little’s Law, and project management.
- Microeconomics: This course is structured around the OpenStax open source Principles of Microeconomics textbook. Hawkes Learning has built an excellent programmed learning structure on this text. My course used their Chapter Learning (reading and learning for each section of the chapters we cover) and Chapter Quizzes.
- There are unlimited tries for the Learning category
- But only two attempts for the Chapter Quizzes.
These formats were added during the COVID shutdown for Microeconomics in the Spring of 2020 and around the same time frame for Operations.
I am contemplating make some drastic changes. There are a few reasons for this:
- AI: Students are using it pretty freely (maybe
wantonly?) in writing paper and in their weekly discussion posts. The can easily use it to solve numerical
problems on graded worksheets and online quizzes and tests. While I don’t have direct evidence on this,
there is a convergence to a certain sameness in terms and flow used in papers
that was not there before AI.
-
Obsession
with Points/Grades: Students are focusing
primarily on their point totals and not on the primary objective (which is
learning something). In my years in
Quality Management and Process Design and Improvement, I have learned that obsession
on one single metric that is not 100% correlated to the real objective will
deliver a suboptimal results. AI enables students maximize the metric with
minimal learning. As a result, students
can ace a course and without actually learning very much.
I believe that we, a large number of professors, have gotten into the habits of having way too many assignments with differing amounts of points. These assignments, their frequency, and their due dates that tend to follow a weekly drumbeat, force a structure on the students to keep them ‘on track’ and active in the course. I liken this to spoon feeding pablum to babies. Because of this, students have not really had full opportunity to develop and master their own method for time and task management. Also, very few do anything, that isn’t assigned. If there are no points, there is little likelihood the vast majority of students would read anything for the sole sake of learning a bit more about a topic.
- Attention in Class: Students generally don’t take notes during class. Some don’t even bring anything to class to write on or write with. This past term I gave a few non-graded quizzes on terms and concepts from the previous few classes. The results were not encouraging.
I remember my math classes from my undergraduate days some 50+ years ago. There was a mid-term exam worth 40% of the grade and a final exam worth 60%. Each day, the professor would lecture and assign a handful of homework problems to be done for the next class. The professor never collected or graded the homework; he would simply ask in the next class if anyone had any questions about the homework. If students asked questions, he would do the problems they had questions about. If there were no questions, he would proceed with the lecture for that day assuming the students were good. Doing the problems or not doing the homework was all on the students. It was not the professors’ job to police such. As first semester freshmen, only about half the students would do the homework. The midterm exam was a day of reckoning for those that didn’t when they inevitably got a D or E on the exam. The students learned that the motivation to do the work and learn the material was on them (intrinsic motivation) versus what they were used to in high school where the motivation was mostly coming from parents and teachers (extrinsic motivation). Also, in those ‘analog’ days, the exams were all done in blue books.
My goal is to get to move toward the midterm/final exam model starting with this next term. Here is what I am thinking about doing:
- Reintroducing
in-class exams: Midterm and final exams will
be given in class. They will be done in
bluebooks with nothing else on the desk except a pencil, an eraser, and a
calculator with no internet connection. At
least half of the points in the class will be from these exams. In Operations, half of the final will be the CSCMP
certification exam.
-
Discussions: We will keep assigning readings/video based discussions
as usual but they will not be graded. Doing
them or not doing them will be up to the student. There will be questions on the readings/video
on the midterm and final exams.
-
Papers: I will still assign two papers. The major change here is that the students must
use AI and include all the prompts and AI answers in appendices of the paper. The main paper need only be 700-1200 words with
2000-4000 words of AI content attached. Grading
will mainly be participation. The midterm
final exams will have short answer questions on the paper topics to verify they
learning something from these assignments.
- Online Materials: The Operations Class will continue to use the CSCMP Materials but for less points than now given. The same for the Hawkes Learning part of Microeconomics.
I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about this and have been feeling a wee bit proud of myself for this scheme to use AI productively and to assess students with midterms and finals devoid of AI. But I know I am not that uniquely clever. So, I queried Gemini AI with the following: “Have the sales of bluebooks increased?” Per the output below, I am very accurate in my assessment that ‘I am not that uniquely clever.’
=== Gemini AI output ===
Yes, sales of physical blue books—the staple-bound booklets used for college examinations—have seen a significant and unexpected increase as of 2025–2026. This resurgence is primarily driven by academic institutions returning to in-class, handwritten exams to combat AI-assisted cheating.
Recent Sales Trends (2024–2025)
Data from various universities and industry trackers show a sharp rise in demand:
- Widespread Growth: Nationwide, blue book sales nearly tripled between 2022 and October 2025, exceeding $300,000 in the first 10 months of 2025 alone.
- University-Specific Surges:
- UC Berkeley: Reported an 80% increase in sales over the two academic years leading into late 2025.
- University of Florida: Sales rose by nearly 50% in the 2024–2025 school year.
-
Texas A&M University: Experienced a 30% increase in campus bookstore sales.
- Manufacturing Impact: Roaring Spring Paper Products, a major Pennsylvania-based supplier, reported a notable upswing in production to meet this new demand.
Primary Drivers
- Combating AI Cheating: With the rise of advanced generative AI
(like ChatGPT), professors are increasingly replacing take-home essays and
digital tests with in-person, proctored exams that require students to
demonstrate knowledge in real-time.
- Low-Tech Security: Handwritten exams provide a straightforward way to ensure students are producing original work without digital assistance.
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