Exam Trivia
The semester is over, the last blue book has been closed and handed in. So, in honor of exams I offer these random tidbits related to exams.
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the famous first lines of The Hobbit — “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty dirty wet hole …” — on a blank page of an examination essay on English literature he was supposed to be grading, sometime in the late 1920s.
Pontiac Paper Company, one of the major producers of “blue books” (and supplier to WTS) produces about eight to nine MILLION exam books annually. Now that’s a LOT of grading.
Some blue books are not “blue.” A few universities change the color of their “blue books” every year to prevent cheating.
The most common blue book has 16 pages… but some contain 44 pages!
At this time of year, certain faculty offices are beginning to take on the look of Stonehenge… stacks and stacks of blue books and papers strategically organized on the floor.
If a professor has a total of 280 students and spends only 10 minutes grading each 16 page exam book (that’s an average of just 37.5 seconds per page, not including time to turn the pages or write comments/grade) it will take still him/her 46.7 hours to grade all the exams (without coffee breaks or lunch breaks or faculty meetings or reading blogs). And, don’t forget, many of us used more than one exam book per exam!! Now, if that same professor ALSO has 150+ exegetical papers to grade, which could total upwards of 3000-4000 pages to read…
Which is why, although we students feel exhausted and spent, the work has only just begun for our professors and instructors. So, as we start to feel the relief of a semester completed and begin to enjoy the Christmas season, I’d like to encourage all of us to remember our professors with prayer and encouragement (and their families too) as they attempt to grade all those blue books!
December 17th, 2005 at 12:48 am
Noooooooo kidding. What does this grateful WTS student have to do now that he’s finished before he returns to Texas? Grade a stack of blue books of my own! Welcome to the first day of my Christmas holiday - a day promising many an hour at Starbucks engrossed in reading material provided by Pontiac Paper Company.
As for the WTS profs, I would understand if, for the sake of saving time, they just defaulted me to an A without bothering to read everything.
December 17th, 2005 at 9:09 am
Believe it or not, I never used a blue book on the collegiate level.
December 17th, 2005 at 11:38 am
When I was a kid, I used to listen to a storyteller on WOR radio in NY named Jean Shepherd.* “Shep” used to frequently say, “that’ll be on the blue book exam.” Until I came to WTS, I thought he’d made that up. Now it is one of the more “very real” things in my life.
And I echo Karyn’s prayers and gratefulness to our profs who have that grading task before them. As a former teacher, I know that fairly grading is one of the hardest things any teacher is asked to do.
December 17th, 2005 at 10:55 pm
At Harvard we were told that the reason “blue books” came in various colors (yellow, green, pink) was because people started associating blue with bad experiences. Apparently blue’s lawyers felt this was unexceptable. But remember, this was the same place where we TA’s were told during our grading of undergrad exams “There are no bad answers, only poorly formulated questions.” Y’all can probably guess that that is one part of my Harvard education I have rejected, as it is squarely at odds with my philosophy “All students are idiots.”
Back to watching The Skeleton Key with my son (who received his accpetence email today Middlebury, by the way).
December 17th, 2005 at 11:27 pm
Well, although Yale thinks that all blue books are so colored in honor of their university, the actual makers of the blue book have no idea why the color was originally chosen. For a little more history on these exam booklets see the article here from the Yale Daily News.
December 18th, 2005 at 12:17 am
Okay, DR. Pete Enns just rose a notch. His philosophy of all students being idiots is exactly why I chose to not become a teacher (that, and being told I could not shoot them).
Blue is my favorite color.
I like Blu Dun’s.
I like blued guns.
But I don’t like glued bunns.
And when I wrote in my plethora of blue books, if I had enjoyed that class/professor, I would draw them a picture in the back, sometimes illustrating my point, but usually just someting fun and relaxing, like a brook trout sipping a Blue Dun.
December 18th, 2005 at 11:50 am
Pete: Congratulations to your son. Attending a New England college or university is one of the fanatsies of my life that will go unfulfilled. At least Machen Hall has some stone and ivy…
Aegidus: if you’re half the artist that your brother is, I’d love to see those blue book doodles!
December 18th, 2005 at 1:33 pm
Mark
I remember Jean Shepherd too. Do you remember “The Bear Missed the Train?” Did you ever see “the Phantom of The Open Hearth?”
BTW
posting under another’s name is “unexceptable”.
December 19th, 2005 at 8:04 pm
No, I am nowhere near half the artist my brother is. I never understood the watercolor thing he has going. I do/did black ink on white paper with lots of geometric representation. I don’t do people well, but elk, timber, mule deer, grouse and fish come off like second nature (wow, thhat speaks volumes…..). All those blu books were thrown away ages ago. Now all I do is illustrate sermons for my kids (”say ‘Shibboleth’, or die!”).
P.S.- whats Middleberry?