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Comment by maxbond | Hacker News Reader

It's not a replacement for a math exam, it's a replacement for an essay. You get some sources and a topic and have an hour or two to write an essay, by hand in the exam room. The alternative being to have the proper time to think and research and then submit your essay in Canvas or whatever.

"Worst nightmare" is hyperbole but they were certainly my least favorite exams.

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Writing an essay by hand in the exam room is also the norm for a final exam.† The term used at my high school was "in-class essay", and they weren't rare. At no point did anyone feel the need to use paper that was bound. Paper is paper.

(I can't really speak to college; I didn't take classes that required essays.)

I always loved in-class essays as an alternative to take-home essays, since the demand on your time is zero instead of "lots".

† A final paper, in contrast, would be written in advance. Usual practice would be to have the paper and the exam. Is the article really saying "schools have started giving exams again"?

My biggest problem with them was that they were painful, my hand would start cramping and such.

I think the benefit of it being bound is a.) they don't want you to use your own paper because it might give you an opportunity to cheat and b.) if 100 students turn in loose leaf essays you're liable to lose a few pages. But that's just my speculation.

The significance of blue books is that, in addition to being bound, they were handed out in class (and numbered) so you couldn't sneak in notes or pre-written pages.

I was fine with such exams from middle and high-school. I could formulate whole thing well enough in my head and then just write it down even with my poor handwriting in reasonable time. And get passable grade.

Never really got any dread, but maybe I just was not pressured to aim too high.

The question is about the physical blue book and what makes it different from blank paper, not about the exam format.

Sometimes the best way to respond to a question is to address it's premise, and I was more responding to the second question ("what were people doing before"), but see my later comment for a more direct answer.

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