\n<\/p>\n
Oral exams are making a comeback, and I\u2019m mostly here for it.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, we had a faculty professional development day on campus. One of the sessions was devoted to faculty greatest hits, defined loosely as teaching techniques that people are proud of and were willing to share with their colleagues. The session was terrific over all, but the one I\u00a0haven\u2019t been able to stop thinking about was from a professor who decided to fight AI-enabled cheating by giving oral exams.<\/p>\n
For context, the class in which he started using oral exams was conducted over Zoom. That made it particularly difficult to prevent students from accessing unauthorized sources during tests. When the apparent cheating hit a level he hadn\u2019t seen before, he resorted to oral exams to force students to rely only on themselves.<\/p>\n
He reported that the exams took about 15 minutes per student, so with a relatively small class, the logistics weren\u2019t prohibitive. As he told it, it became clear quickly which students had mastered the material and which were just lost. <\/p>\n
Oral exams aren\u2019t exactly a new technology, but they have a new appeal. Readers of a certain generation may remember MTV Unplugged<\/em>. It was a concert show in which performers had to use only nonelectric instruments. Stripped of synthesizers and Auto-Tune, some musicians thrived and some really struggled. (I remember my roommates and I laughing ourselves silly at Duran Duran\u2019s effort on Unplugged<\/em>. By contrast, Nirvana\u2019s was so good that the performance came out later as an album.) <\/p>\n Oral exams are similar; when the student doesn\u2019t have any of the usual crutches, you get a cleaner sense of what they actually know. Now that the illicit crutches are ubiquitous, forcing students to unplug is more useful than ever.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll admit breaking into a cold sweat at the memory of my own oral exams in grad school, but those were long, high-stakes and conducted by a group. In retrospect, though, part of what made that so difficult was that I\u2019d never had an oral exam up to that point. I hadn\u2019t had any practice. And if I\u2019m being honest, the professors hadn\u2019t had much practice, either. That was a hell of a time to start.<\/p>\n From the administrative side, I can imagine a few potential concerns with oral exams. I\u2019m hoping that my wise and worldly readers can help.<\/p>\n The first and most basic one is that most of us don\u2019t have much experience designing oral exams. I\u2019ve never seen a workshop on design principles for orals. (They may exist, but I\u2019ve never seen or heard of one.) To be fair, most of us were never taught how to construct written exams, either, but at least most of us have experience there. In the absence of serious attention to ways to construct oral exams, I\u2019d have a concern about validity.<\/p>\n The second is about grade appeals. If the exam is lost to history, how does a student reasonably contest a grade? I don\u2019t mean to encourage appeals, but there needs to be some way for a student to press a case when they feel wronged. Presumably the exams could be recorded, but there, too, we\u2019d need serious and enforced rules governing access to the recording and when it would need to be deleted.<\/p>\n Finally, there\u2019s a basic issue of stage fright. A student freezing up could be clueless, or they could be paralyzed with fear. It would be a shame to fail a student who actually knows their stuff because they got nervous and went into vapor lock. Presumably this issue would fade if oral exams became a lot more common, but the first wave is likely to run into this one repeatedly. Test anxiety is bad enough for written exams; combine it with stage fright and some capable students will struggle. <\/p>\n Still, none of these strike me as dispositive. <\/p>\n Wise and worldly readers, have you found ways to ensure that oral exams are well designed? How do you handle recording? And what do you do about student stage fright? I\u2019d love to hear at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com. Thanks!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oral exams are making a comeback, and I\u2019m mostly here for it. A few weeks ago, we had a faculty professional development day on campus. One of the sessions was devoted to faculty greatest hits, defined loosely as teaching techniques that people are proud of and were willing to share with their colleagues. The session<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30623,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[4542,12007,4346,17935],"class_list":{"0":"post-30622","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-exams","9":"tag-mtv","10":"tag-oral","11":"tag-unplugged"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}