Monday Miscellany, 6/2/25

Here is the president’s reasoning:

For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies. Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time.

Actually, a penny now costs 3.7 cents.  But what difference does that make?   Since we are no longer on a precious metal standard, the monetary value of a coin is not related to the cost of its materials or its production.  The coin has to be durable enough to circulate in countless transactions, carrying its value of 1% of a dollar every time.

Besides, nickels, which we will now need more of, cost 13.78 cents. Dimes cost 5.76 cents.  And quarters cost 14.68 cents.

Notice that those cost reports break down the penny into decimal fractions (.7, .78, .76, .68 cents).  One could say of that what many people say of the penny:  That value is so small, why mess with it?  The answer is that while it means little in a single transaction, in thousands or millions of such transactions, the number adds up.  If a business rounds up the price of a product two cents to the next nickel in a million transactions, that $0.02 is costing $40,000.

I know, the idea is that some expenses will round up and some will round down, so that it will all average out in the end. But still. . . .Precision is an important intellectual value.

I suspect that the larger agenda in eliminating the penny is the elimination of cash.  Credit card and online payments will still be exact to the last penny.  And today only 16% of all payments are in cash.

To save on the cost of making credit cards, maybe the government should just tattoo a scannable bar code on everyone’s right hand or forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark. 

A Technology That Thwarts AI Cheating

Cheating is rampant at every level of education today, thanks to the easy-to-use free Artificial Intelligence application ChatGPT.

AI will do your homework for you, write your papers, and take your tests.  And students are taking full advantage of this capability.

Ben Cohen has written an article about this for the Wall Street Journal.  He comments,

It might feel like ChatGPT came out yesterday, but students who were freshmen when it was released in 2022 will be seniors next year. That means they’ve had access to the most powerful cheating machines ever made for basically their entire time in college. And they have come to rely on ChatGPT. One of the most remarkable things about the product’s explosive growth is that ChatGPT traffic declined in each of the past two summers—when students were not in school.

This means that a student graduating from college next year may have done no work over the four years necessary for the degree.  And yet graduate with a 4.0 average.

Some professors are just giving up.  Cohen quotes a Tulane political science professor who has stopped assigning papers altogether. “It’s a pointless exercise,” he said. “It’s like going to the gym and having robots lift the weights for you.”

I would add that at least some professors are going along with it.  At a speaking engagement in Houston I brought up what technology is doing to us.  During the Q&A, a woman said that her son is an engineering major at a well-known east coast university.  One of his math professors told the class that they really don’t need to know calculus.  They can just type the problems into AI and get the answers they will need.  (I am convinced that academic cynicism is one of the main causes of our current educational decline.)

But at least some professors are trying to do something about it.  They are countering the new technology with an old technology:  the Blue Book!

Are any of you old enough to remember Blue Books?  Those are cheap 8.5″ x 7″ booklets of lined paper with a blue cover, usually with the title Blue Book.  Professors would hand them out, distribute an essay exam, then watch as students wrote out their answers by hand.  As the minutes clicked by, students would try to write faster and faster, their hands cramping, which made them write slower and slower.

“They were every student’s worst nightmare,” says Cohen.  “The mere thought of that exam booklet with a blue cover and blank pages is enough to make generations of college kids clam up—and make their hands cramp up.”

But there was a lot less cheating in classes that used Blue Books.  With the advent of word processing technology, it has become the norm even for in-class exams to allow students to write their answers on their laptops.  But it’s easy to sign into the internet and access AI.

So many professors have returned to Blue Book tests.  Blue Book sales in college bookstores are booming, and the company that makes them–Roaring Springs Paper Products, a small Pennsylvania paper company not unlike Dunder Mifflin in The Office–is cashing in.

The problem now, though, is that, as we’ve complained at this blog, most schools have stopped teaching cursive, which you really need in trying to fill an exam booklet in 50 minutes.  And the professors who grade them must labor to read their students’ nearly illegible scribblings.