Return of the Bluebook

Writing a final exam is thoroughly a one-way proposition. You never get to see it again. Finals are hurriedly processed by the instructor or his assistants; after grades are recorded the bluebooks are promptly thrown out.

This hasty disappearance of the bluebook is a serious weakness in the College's examination system, for a corrected exam can be one of the student's most useful study aids. One primary argument for hour exams was that they give the student a chance to size-up his work in terms of what the course and its instructors are driving at. And corrected finals, mid-years especially, are equally useful. A fall term final, fully explained and corrected, can tie up a full course into a neat package the student can work with for the rest of the year.

The main reason for the spiriting away and destruction of bluebooks is time. It is a long and tiring process for the grader or instructor to answer the often foolish gripes of a mass of unsatisfied undergraduates. But examining and answering these complaints and questions should be just as much a part of education as marking the exams, perhaps even more so. One chief aspect of effective learning is full knowledge of results; the Social Relations people have worked up some ingenious little experiments proving this.

If exams are to teach as well as to test, the knowledge of their results must include far more than a grade scrawled on a postcard or machine-typed onto a form letter. Final exams take a tremendous amount of time from student as well as instructor; the return of these exams, even if only temporary, would do much to make that time expenditure more worthwhile.