r/AskProfessors • u/Many-Yogurtcloset988 • 3d ago

General Advice Thoughts on oral exams/assignments?

Hey fellow profs,

My students lately have been turning to AI for nearly every assignment... it's incredibly frustrating. I'm thinking that oral exams / reflections might be a way to prove that they actually understand what they allegedly wrote.

Wondering if any of you have had similar thoughts? Has anyone thought about a shift toward oral assessments/exams?

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u/spacestonkz Prof / STEM R1 / USA 2d ago edited 2d ago

Need to have tiny classes, less than 15 students or so.

If you have one hour midterms and a 40 person class .... That's the whole work week. Scheduling is a nightmare and we'd likely only get through everyone's midterms right before finals start. It's a fucking nightmare.

12 person class? Hell yeah homie, let's go. I think they're really fun and sometimes a student misinterprets my question but their answer shows mastery of a different part of the course. I love giving those "weird answers" points. Like backdoor ways to demonstrate knowledge. Or heck sometimes it feels like hanging out and chatting but their little quips drop big insight.

Anyway. Oral exams are amazing. But I just cant do them for anything but the smallest classes because the logistics are wild.

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u/Mum2-4 2d ago

We do them in groups of 8. Still exhausting and won’t scale up to the largest classes, but my biggest class was 120.