Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I wish we were doing this in the US even before AI was an issue. I suspect it would reorient students to their work in some pretty cool ways. I mean, it might feel like torture for some and maybe that’s not so much a bad thing. I’m sure I’m not thinking of some downsides to this too, but it seems like such a great counter against “factory” schooling. Of course, this could be a lot more work for faculty and could be hard to keep up with a huge student population. Again, maybe a feature more than a bug.by camphy
- It feels like systems like the Maturita' final multi-day exam in Italy do a pretty good job at providing students with a standardized, state-supervised process for demonstrating one's competence by the end of high school. No computers, you're under the watchful eye of your teachers the whole time, nobody knows what's going to be on the exam until the day of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matura#Italy
It's time consuming and nerve-wracking, but it feels fair.
by akurilin - The problem with oral exam is that it’s done serially student by student, which can be infeasible with large classes. The grading is also highly subjective.
Written exams are also not best suited to project-based classes.
What’s the best way to grade students in classes with coding projects?
by aborsy - Arguably, the problem with higher education is one of volume.
- Its serial nature also means that an evaluator's standards can drift from students with early exams to those with later exams. Oral exams can introduce issues of sex and ethnic biasing.by whyenot
- This is great. Sorry, but the Western World has to stop normalizing extreme introvertism. Humans are social. We rely on communication and cooperation to survive. Allowing kids to shelter themselves from interaction and communication during crucial development stages will only hamper them in life.by snapetom
- I'm quite impressed with the Hungarian system, for 18-19 year old school leavers, where every subject is split 50/50 between:
The oral (szóbeli) has:- Írásbeli (written) - standardised written exam, centrally set and marked - Szóbeli (oral) - the panel interview- A committee of 2-3 teachers sits as a panel - The student draws a topic at random from a list - They get prep time (usually 15-20 mins) - They present their answer to the panel - The panel asks follow-up questions and probes understandingby Daviey - Why is everyone in this thread comparing this to a University
But yeah, this is a good step.
Homework is also becoming obsolete at this point. If they can't do it with pen and paper in class, there's no reliable way to evaluate work anymore.
by lacoolj - Only as an honor system for students who want to learn the material.
But worthless for assessments and assigning grades.
by jimbokun - I'm teaching a university math course next semester and I've been messing around with a solution to this that my old analysis professor used to employ. Every week, they take home a handful of theory questions. These aren't turned in for credit. But, every week, there'll be a short quiz where one of those questions are asked verbatim, along with a small follow up.
That felt like a very natural solution to me. Of course, worst case scenario, they just blindly generate and memorize the proofs without thinking. But I think the follow ups will catch them in that case. Moreover, I choose to believe that >90% of my students are willing to at least put in the work of scrutinizing those proofs which is honestly not bad exercise in its own right.
I would love to do oral exams directly, the logistics with the number of students I have just make that hard. I know we're trialing it with the less populated special topics courses.
by trostaft - I had to do an oral defense of my thesis in graduate school. When you've spent months and months writing something extremely obscure... well, I'd hope that it's not that difficult.by scoofy
- You suddenly realize the foremost expert on the research in your dissertation…is you.by jimbokun
- In my high school English class (like 10 years ago) my teacher assigned readings and called on a random person each day to give an overview of a section. He basically quizzed you in front of the class on themes, plots, etc. It was very effective at getting me to read and care for that class, because if you just sat up there and didn't know anything you'd lose marks on participation (and look kind of dumb). Not sure if/when/why oral presentations and public speaking are no longer got prioritized.by willmeyers
- As an educator myself, this quarter for the first time for my course's final project, I've switched to actually asking my students to provide an "AI Authenticity Audit" of their (project-relevant) chats in the construction of said projects. All my students' output over the last two years went from pre-AI level quality to boardroom-ready polish, and I'm actually more interested to see how they arrive at an outcome rather than the final output itself - focusing on their questioning, curating, editing, and iterating process. Didn't think we'd get to somewhere like this so soon, but here we are. Strange, but I'm trying it out.
- IMO this kind of thing adds work and stress for the best students. If I'd been faced with something like this while I was in school I would have felt the need to basically curate a parallel construction AI discussion, knowing it would be judged. I understand the theory that, in the age of AI, the prompts are more interesting than the outputs, but I'm not convinced this is the way.
Things like the Denmark approach (and/or in-person written responses) seem like a better direction. Treat take-home writing the same as we've treated take-home math questions - as useful practice (for those who choose to actually engage with it), but not a significant input to grading.
by tempestn - Oral Defences have a long established tradition in Denmark, but recently there’s been real cut back on this as a money saving exercise. So both teachers and Students are familiar with this form of examination.
So for a dane this reads like “back to the old way”, rather than anything new or novel.
- This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments.
But what it does threaten to do is effectively abandon all the efficiencies of the written word.
When higher education evolved into a mass system in the 1800s and into the 1900s, pure oral examination was looked at as super inefficient. A written paper could be handed in and graded without lining everyone up in front of a panel.
The oral system scales poorly. One examiner can only hear so many students in a day. There are damn good reasons Medieval universities were small and modern ones are not.
Requiring every major paper to be defended live reintroduces the bottleneck that written exams were designed to escape.
Accessibility takes a hit too. Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective? This does not seem very logical, or sensitive.
So while it’s nice that academics are rediscovering the old ways, I don’t really see this as a scalable answer to raising education levels for the masses, but more of a knee jerk way to try to bypass the obvious technological disruption by returning to non-scalable, inaccessible ways of doing things that our ancestors abandoned for a reason.
It has its place for graduate students and smaller volume education systems. It’s fine for keeping the ivory tower clean. But it’s not the answer to expanding education to everyone and taking advantage of the technological disruption to advance education and learning throughout greater humanity, which is what AI definitely possesses as a possibility.
by datahack - It’s a good answer for keeping online education honest. It doesn’t need to be applied to all in-person schools, where teachers distribute spot checks across the course relatively evenly, but it makes perfect sense in conjunction with online testing. You only have to challenge one essay per student per term to catch cheaters with a near-perfect success rate. Assuming a 12 week course with 36 students, that’s qty.3-4 of teacher:student one on one meetings per week for the term; I think that’s doable. If you’ve oversold your teachers and have more than 36 students per, guess you’ll have to increase your labor expenses :Dby altairprime
- I graduated in 2000 and remember doing the oral defence. It wasn't a huge deal. You already have a personal relationship with your tutors and they are familiar with you and your communication style. They are not the Gestapo.by Neil44
- Oral exams are --- at least partial -- a thing since "ever" in the german school system. Details matter, over here schooling belongs to culture, and the culture sector is in the hands of the 16 federal german states, so things vary a bit from e.g. Hessen to Bayern to Sachsen.
* you are in school and your marks are between two marks, e.g. between 1 and 2. You can voluntarily take the oral exam to swing the tide towards the 1 ... this is even a case for apprenticeship exams, not just normal school. * you are at the risk of not getting into the next class year. Often here the oral exam is mandatory.
Personally, I think this is great. Some people are better orally. But some have trouble, e.g. social anxieties. And some people are better theoretical, with a piece of paper. But other struggle with an "empty white paper". And since we don't want to test the difficulties of people, but their domain knowledge of e.g. mathematics, politics or electronic scheme design (again: think that this is also for apprenticeships), that we do both is IMHO a good thing.
- Even in fairly recent times viva voce was common. I had to defend my final year report on a long piece of practical work as part of the final for my BSc in Applied Physics in 1975.
You don't need to do everything orally. A return to handwritten final exams done without electronic aids would help too. They can be open note as mine were in the mid 70s or even open book.
As for scalability, I really don't see the problem; if we are producing so many qualified people then we surely can use some of them to examine the next generation. It sounds like the argument that often appears on the web where someone, usually an American, claims that a solution that works in, say the UK, can't work in their country simply because their population is larger.
Also, we really should consider if shoe horning every young person into an academic institution is useful either to society or to the person concerned. It certainly has not been an unmixed success in the UK.
by ninalanyon - > Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective?
Universities are entirely elective, why would they need to cater specifically to disabilities? Driving schools don't make exceptions for the blind. There are skills that people expect you to have with a certain kind of diploma, and it reflects poorly on the school if they don't have a standard to hold people to. Not being able to present your work in a basic way is one of those mandatory skills that imo makes you unqualified to graduate if you don't grasp it.
I'm not saying you can't make an exception for a person or two who is clearly as good or better than the rest otherwise, but people will always try to misuse as many exceptions as they can, en masse, as an excuse to just avoid doing required work.
by moffkalast - I think you have the right observation but the wrong conclusion.
The appeal of digital systems, at a social level, is that they can transmit information accurately for almost no marginal cost. They come at the risk of fraud.
With AI the levels of risk have increased. Anyone can now be a fraudster, and it gets harder and harder to prove anything online. Either of us two, in this conversation, could be a well tuned LLM.
So society, collectively and at an individual level, is forced to reassess reliance on purely digital information. Which means that the advances in the technology, actually end up reducing the utility of digital systems more generally.
You can argue that this makes education costly and less accessible. It does. It absolutely does. There is also no alternative except to see higher education get wiped out, which would have devastating economic and social effects.
So we are going back to blue books and vivas.
by zero_shift - Oral exams can also compensate a lot for different types of exam anxiety. Blanking on individual points doesn't matter as much, the examiner will help you along or ask along a different path. Doesn't help for someone that completely shuts down, but it's much easier to determine if a student was just stuck on some minor point and actually knows the topic in an oral exam.
They are likely prone to more biases than written exams, and the variability among examiners is likely high. My experience is both in taking these exams myself, and also sitting in on them as the note taker many times. Though that was only with one specific professor, and almost always on the same course. But that was in my experience a very fair exam, even for those students that were very noticeably nervous.
by fabian2k - Oral exams are still common in Germany and many European countries in case of smaller courses taken by 20-30 students in a semester, and sometimes even in larger courses, and the task of examining is then split among multiple professors and lecturers.
In Hungary it's a pipeline. You go in a room, you pick a piece of paper out of a hat, which gives you some task or topic to prepare for. Then you sit down at a desk (the room is filled with about 15 students working already), then you solve the problem or sketch out your notes to present the topic you picked for like 20 minutes, then you go to the professor and you have to, in low voice, explain your solution, the professor asks back and pokes at it to make sure you understand. The professor then gives a grade immediately and you go home.
In Germany, it's usually no random pick of a topic, you just go through the entire semester's material over 30-45 minutes and the professor stops to spend more or less time on each topic to explore your knowledge. You can explain things by making sketches on paper. A PhD student sits there quietly taking notes of what was asked and what the student answers approximately. You leave the room, the prof and the PhD student discuss the performance, decide the grade and you come back, and the professor explains the grade and what you did well and not well.
by bonoboTP - This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's very apparent to both student and teachers how well a topic is understood. Marks are rarely contested and in my experience most students think the process is fair.
Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....
by azalemeth - > We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance)
This is also an absolutely great way to ensure the participants really understand what they’re saying, even aside from ai-related concerns. You could always pull definitions straight from textbooks, and write something which mostly makes sense but that you don’t really understand. But you really can’t teach something unless you do understand it, imo. The best command I ever got on a topic was due to TA’ing
- >>> Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....
True but maybe a blessing in disguise. As a shy college kid once (although not with any real disability), being forced to get up in front of people helped me get over it. And I was 10x better after a semester of teaching during a break in my career.
by analog31 - So, I grew up in the former Soviet Union. Starting with ninth grade entrance entrance and exit exams were like that. I remember I had to take university physics exam just to be able to qualify for a consideration. It was fairly rough, but I think in a way, good system because it sifted out the wannabes early on.by vardalab
- > Of course, woe betide those with social phobias...
The professors at my grad school had a very amazing tact to get through this as well. They had enough time for specific students who they knew struggled with such issues during the mid semester orals and then had an amazing way of getting answers from them even in the discomfort.
It is amazing how much can be done with soft talking, slow progression and pauses in between from professors who care.
by whateverboat