Don’t Call it a Comeback

According to a December 12, 2025, Washington Post article, a “small but growing number of educators are experimenting with oral exams to circumvent the temptations presented by powerful AI platforms.” Similar articles have appeared advocating for the “return” of bluebooks and Scantrons and in-person tests on paper. These are all good things, but they don’t always need to be brought back—because there are plenty of places that they never left.

There are many institutions and professors who value quality education and who have never abandoned proven testing techniques even prior to the advance of AI. I have been using blue books for final exams since 2012, when I first arrived at my university. I am not alone in that. The honors program I teach in has long used an oral exam as the final test of four years’ worth of learning. Graduate programs all over the country have maintained timed prelim exams and oral defenses despite the march of technology.

Anyone capable of observation has known to be skeptical of the innovative testing options presented to us in the last ten years. We have long had plagiarism detectors for papers that students write in their own time and space, but online and non-paper testing is exceptionally vulnerable to cheating, which is why companies like Honorlock exist. That was true before AI, and anyone who was unsure about the risks became acquainted with them during the online teaching mandated by COVID, when online cheating became a nationwide problem.

We may ask ourselves how we can defend academic integrity from AI, but we should first ask how we became so vulnerable to AI in academia. Yes, we have some faculty who prefer the ease of online, remote testing. In some cases, online textbooks even provide the tests. Some people are lazy. A bigger issue is the way that universities have pushed online learning to boost their income without draining their in-person resources (see Capitalizing on College by Joshua Travis Brown) and without worrying too much about the quality of the education. Almost no one believes that online college learning is as good as in-person. Another issue is the way that universities seek to upstage their competition by being technologically advanced.

All that innovation is expensive and sometimes misguided. An interesting thing about being “innovative” is that it was considered a negative trait for most of the word’s history. To be accused of being an “innovator” in the seventeenth century could be injurious to one’s health. If there’s any kind of institution grounded in the old ways and old words, it should be a university. The robes are medieval, as are some of the disciplines. The most prestigious schools are known for their long histories. Even at younger schools, alumni are unwilling to give up familiar traditions and rituals. The best universities understand their role as traditional institutions—entrusted with handing down the wisdom of the past—and do not chase innovation as though it were a magic elixir.

Across higher education, many professors and schools have maintained traditional, proven approaches to testing and teaching. Blue books and Scantrons do not need to return to places they never left. And institutions which have upheld that which has worked well in the past and, it turns out, remains capable of countering the threats of the present, should be acknowledged and appreciated. There are professors who already have screen-free classrooms and professors who have never allowed phones. Not everyone in K-12 fell for the Chromebooks, either.

This goes far beyond blue books because this moment highlights what we culturally get so wrong about education. What we have now is a rash of calls to return, just as we previously had a slew of essays advocating the newest thing. What we rarely get are profiles of people and schools who have used observation and experience to maintain what works without being lured away by shiny new objects and who have managed slow, deliberate adoption of new pedagogy and testing.

It would be better for education and for the public if we had more profiles of teaching excellence rather than arguments for and against the adoption of tools in teaching. Unfortunately, while we have many movies about fictional or fictionalized inspirational teachers and coaches, there is no Chef’s Table for teaching. Even though chefs sell cookware, no fool thinks he is one chafing dish away from being Ferran Adrià or one grill improvement away from being on the pitmaster level of Rodney Scott. Yet fools do think that outfitting an elementary school in Chromebooks is a guarantee of excellence. Universities are currently racing to get all of their students chatbots.

Educational excellence cannot be guaranteed by tools because it is not a product of tools. Educational excellence is a product of teaching. On the K-12 level, some teachers are denied the opportunity to aspire to a Chef’s Table level of excellence because their range of freedom resembles the kitchen of a quick-service restaurant. On the university level, faculty have much more freedom, but universities often fail to prioritize teaching. They would rather invest millions of dollars in questionable technology than invest in faculty development or create more research opportunities for undergraduates. In many places, faculty are disincentivized from prioritizing teaching. The rewards come from research, which leads to tenure, or from moving up into administration.

The focus on the tools of the trade reflects a lack of awareness of the trade itself. People know that you can buy the same golf clubs as a professional and that does not mean you will be able to achieve the same results. The same results may not be achievable at all, but if you want to get as close as you can, you will spend hours and years training and emulating and probably hiring coaches. Yet how consistently are professors encouraged to emulate examples of excellence? How much money is invested in helping them improve their teaching? Tragically, despite being more “teaching” than “research” universities, small universities are often investing the least in faculty development. Most people cannot control university budgets and agendas (we have more control over K-12), but the least we can do as a culture is to seek out examples of excellence in teaching and look to those as a guide rather than obsess over tools.

The reason it seems like blue books are making a “comeback” is because few have been paying attention to people who have been quietly maintaining standards and sticking with what works for years. Even at universities, the faculty who are only now opting in to blue books and oral exams have had good examples around them that they have ignored. There are better and worse tools—yes, you should be using blue books—but as long as we keep the focus on tools, we never get to the heart of teaching and we remain vulnerable to tool salesmen. And if we fail to celebrate those who have been getting things right, they lack the social support they need to advocate for the best outcomes when the next innovation comes around.

Image Credit: Thomas Brooks, “The New Pupil” (1854)