A Practical, Scalable Template for Oral Exams

Ever since the public debut of ChatGPT in 2023, some thoughtful proposals have been offered for using oral examinations to successfully counter the illegitimate use of AI by college students. After all, it’s hard to cheat in an oral exam; the professor is sitting right there, looking at you. And oral exams also increase student engagement, support the development of speaking skills and perhaps foster a deeper commitment to learning the material.

But while that’s all true and admittedly valuable, many instructors remain daunted by the time commitment required, the difficulty of grading, the physical and emotional exhaustion of constantly focusing on the student speaking, and the logistical challenge of scaling such a technique. Can this be done with, say, dozens of students in a class?

I recently retired after 40 years of teaching undergraduates. For the last 30 of those, I and sometimes several colleagues in the Hamilton College sociology department used oral exams routinely, in classes as large as 44 students, with multiple oral exams in a single course. Administering the exams was initially challenging but manageable, and they had several clear advantages over written exams or essays: They dramatically improved student engagement and performance. In fact, after some serious initial trepidation, students reported that they actually came to value the experience tremendously for years and even decades afterward. And the exam format consolidated and saved grading time over either written exams or papers.

Here I’m offering the format I used, as a model for others to use and revise as appropriate.

Preparation

A week or so before each exam period began, I provided students with six essay questions that might be asked—enough to cover the important material they needed to understand, but not so many as to discourage full preparation. For the first exam, the questions were comparatively straightforward and not especially difficult, as the oral format itself was daunting to most students. Over the semester, however, the exam questions became increasingly challenging and comprehensive.

Giving the students questions in advance allowed them to channel their test anxiety into a productive channel and eliminated excuses for not being prepared—after all, they had the questions in advance. It also allowed them to prepare and rehearse their answers, so that preparation and performance would be highly correlated. Students were also allowed, and encouraged, to work together in developing their answers, so they often were teaching and motivating each other in coming to understand the course material.

Note well: Most students were very nervous—“terrified,” in some cases— about the exam. But I provided clear directions on how to prepare. They had the possible questions in hand and were given plenty of time (a week) to plan and practice the answers. I held review sessions and extra office hours, and they had their classmates to help out. There could be no excuses for poor work. Emotional engagement was, let’s say, very high.

For each exam week, I offered a schedule of available time slots, each one 20 minutes long—15 minutes of exam time, plus five minutes for writing up my comments and getting ready for the next student. Students would sign up (usually via an in-class lottery system) for the slot they preferred, within my maximum of 10 exams in a day. That meant I would be doing exams for at most three and a half hours a day—a substantial amount of time, but manageable over the course of one week.

Testing

For the exam meeting itself, the student would enter my office and take a seat—although some chose instead to stand, and a few paced the entire time. They were allowed no written notes; in my office, it would be, I used to tell them, between “just you, me and God.” I would hand them a standard six-sided gaming die, which they rolled to determine which three of the six questions they would answer. This randomization precluded “psyching out” the professor, plus it added a heavy dose of drama to the entire event. Even decades after college, when I jokingly offered to hand them the dice, former students would shrink back, laughing (“No, no!”).

Students would then launch into their (usually well-prepared) answers. Some had memorized entire essays, most had at least a full outline and a few stumbled through some basic points. Almost all were noticeably nervous in the first exam. I would listen respectfully, encouraging them when needed, for maybe two or three minutes, and then begin interjecting with follow-up questions: “How do you mean that?” “Could you explain that part a little more?” and so on.

With these follow-up questions, it usually became utterly clear which students truly understood the material and which ones had just learned the right things to say or memorized something a classmate had told them. When a student didn’t know the material, there was nowhere to hide, and the few who didn’t prepare usually appeared to be immediately mortified by the experience. I listened and took casual notes during the exam, just scribbling comments while still carefully attending to the student. The feedback to them was unmistakable, even before I responded with written comments; they seemed to know right away how, in general, they had performed.

After a student answered their three questions, I would often ask if they had anything to add, thank them and send them out. I then elaborated on my notes and penciled in a very rough grade estimate.

When all the exams were finished, I usually spent about two hours on the weekend completing the detailed written comments for each student on all three questions, then ranking the entire set (checking for fairness) and finalizing their grades. I always returned them on the first class day following the exam week. Since the hardest part of the grading was simply listening to them talk, my work was mostly done by week’s end. There could be no procrastinating on my part, and I actually enjoyed the entire process rather than seeing it as a painful chore.

Results

The most obvious result of using oral exams was that students’ emotional and intellectual engagement—with the course material, with each other and with me—soared. It was all but impossible for them not to care about the exam, given that they were traditional-aged young people facing off with a college professor in an introductory class. They were initially scared but worked intensely with each other (and me) to prepare. High-stakes, one-on-one, face-to-face encounters are among the most emotionally intense experiences of our lives, and completing one successfully is a tremendously satisfying experience. Students came away having seriously worked on the topics covered by the questions and had ready-at-hand responses to important issues. They learned.

They also dramatically improved their speaking skills over the series of three exams. After the first one, most got the hang of the testing format and knew better how to prepare. All of them improved, and some, armed with sharply honed outlines, actually became articulate, even under the heavy pressure of an exam. That freed them up to answer more intellectually challenging questions, and their confidence grew. Ever since, former students have repeatedly told me that after those exams, they never feared a job interview.

Finally, my relationship with the students deepened profoundly. I came to understand what they did and didn’t know of the material, and often why; I better understood what each of them cared about and wanted to learn about; and our personal bond, in many cases, became much stronger. We had a meaningful relationship and felt we knew each other. The system worked both intellectually and personally.

You should try it sometime.