6 ms·

In the Czech Republic, and I'm sure this is true in some other countries, many of the exams are oral. The student is given a prompt and they have to stand in f

In the Czech Republic, and I'm sure this is true in some other countries, many of the exams are oral. The student is given a prompt and they have to stand in front of the teacher(s) and talk about it, giving as much detail as possible. I think it's a great way to handle exams and I wonder if we'll need to shift towards that in the future.

brianbreslin 4y ago
My father who is a college professor in his late 70s is starting to do this in the US as he found less correlation between a written assignment and students actually knowing what the material was. Forcing a presentation makes it harder for them to cheat.
- n4r9 4y ago
  On the other hand, it risks privileging students that are extroverted and skilled at using rhetoric to disguise ignorance.
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    If students are successful at using rhetoric to disguise their ignorance from their teachers, we need to be looking into how teachers are selected, trained and compensated.
  - staticautomatic 4y ago
    Only so long as the teacher can’t tell the difference.
  - mountainb 4y ago
    Just like real life. When schools had more prestige, they also relied more heavily on intensive oral examinations. Some of the most prestigious schools in the world still rely heavily on intense oral examinations. Universities can also crib from how law school exams work if they want to still do written examinations.
    - foobarian 4y ago
      IIRC Harvard Business School tracks attendance, students have name plates, and get cold called.
      - criddell 4y ago
        I’m not sure you can do the cold calling thing at a public school. Everybody at HBS signed up for that, public school kids did not.
        frostburg 4y ago
        Every school (and many university professors) does "cold calls" in Italy, as far as I know; scheduled oral examinations are the exception, not the rule, before university. Not knowing the answer at a random university lecture doesn't generally impact your grades, however, because in most cases those are 100% based on a final (often oral) exam. I wouldn't argue that it is a system without issues but it's still better than rote essay writing.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - account42 4y ago
    On the other hand, oral exams can be less stressful as long as the examiner is friendly as there can be opportunity to correct mistakes where you do know the subject matter but just had a brainfart. You also get a chance to spend more times / show off on the parts you do know better. I am very much not an extroverted person and in University written exams were almost always more stressful than oral ones as they try to cram as much as possible into into the time available or were too easy (so at the top end grading becomes very nitpicky) or too hard (which can be demoralizing if no one even manages to complete all questions). Oral exams have much more flexibility to adapt to the individual here.
    - gyy52380 4y ago
      I think this really depends on your specific university. At my university in Eastern Europe the teachers were bitter and overworked, and that really showed during oral examinations. Because of the high number students enrolled in the classes, almost all oral exams also featured a written component, very similar to a regular exam. Because of the unstructured nature of oral exams, you would have an arbitrary amount of time to solve it. After that the professor would make you elaborate some of your anwsers, or not, depending how he felt like. The students who performed best were indeed very extroverted and able to convince the professor that they actually meant something other than what they wrote. The professors also used these exams to give you an arbitrary grade for the subject, depending exclusively on your oral exam "performance". I remember having a high 90% grade in the written part of my Advanced Electronics class. The professor didn't feel I was confident enough in my answers during the oral exam, so he passed me with 1/30 points even though I answered most of the answers correct, thus bringing my grade down to barely a C. Oral exams sound great in theory but in practice they always felt somewhere between unfair and traumatizing. I much prefer the objectivity of written exams.
    - gjulianm 4y ago
      > On the other hand, oral exams can be less stressful as long as the examiner is friendly as there can be opportunity to correct mistakes where you do know the subject matter but just had a brainfart. You also get a chance to spend more times / show off on the parts you do know better. I don't agree with this at all. Even with a friendly examiner, they have far more presence than in a written exam. You are presenting and being actively judged, unlike in a written exam. Also, you'll spend more time on the parts you know worse precisely because you'll be slower, make more mistakes... > they try to cram as much as possible into into the time available or were too easy (so at the top end grading becomes very nitpicky) or too hard (which can be demoralizing if no one even manages to complete all questions). Oral exams have much more flexibility to adapt to the individual here. Badly adapted exams are a feature of the teacher, not the type of exam. If anything, oral exams are worse for more complex content, as they tend to be shorter in time.
  - prepend 4y ago
    I don’t think extrovert is necessarily correlated with skilled speaker. I know lots of extroverts who are terrified of speaking in front of others and introverts who love it. I think this is easier for people who are good at speaking but I think exercises like this will develop the skill.
    - fullstop 4y ago
      > I don’t think extrovert is necessarily correlated with skilled speaker. My oldest is quite introverted but can somehow flip a switch internally and is excellent at public speaking. She's won a number of speech competitions and is far better at this sort of thing than I will ever be.
      - Auracle 4y ago
        I’m quite introverted and wasn’t at the level that your daughter is, but apparently did well enough at an impromptu speech in college that I had a very cute girl from the class look me up and add me on Facebook. I still absolutely hated doing it though.
        fullstop 4y ago
        Please tell me that you made a move.
        Auracle 4y ago
        I was already dating someone. Oddly enough she married someone from my hometown. The college was 3.5 hours away from that town of ~2,000 and he didn't go to our college. If I ever bump in to one of them I'm going to need to ask how that came about.
        fullstop 4y ago
        I'll be honest I wanted to hear that the two of you met up, got married, and had a bunch of babies together. I guess your answer will have to do!
  - sethammons 4y ago
    I loved the style of book report that we had with a high school English teacher. While the class was otherwise busy, the teacher called you up to report on your self-chosen-from-a-list book. The teacher opened the book to a page and would read a passage and ask questions about it like what are they talking about, what happened right before and after this. After a couple of passages at different spots, you got your grade. You are not feigning anyone familiar with the material.
  - sroussey 4y ago
    Does not work with math and engineering. I had a very difficult electrical engineering course and the final was solving a problem on a whiteboard in the teachers office.
    - n4r9 4y ago
      Either there is no discussion with the teacher, in which case it might as well be done on paper at a desk; or there is discussion with the teacher, in which case students with more advanced social skills are often able to elicit more help without betraying that they lack knowledge or intelligence.
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    good. youre right i got through a lot of presentations easier than other classmates but thats cause learning to present really well is an essential skill. students should be skilled at using rhetoric so i see that as a feature not a bug. everything else in life will reward being well spoken and outgoing, why shouldnt school as well?
    - gjulianm 4y ago
      School should be testing you for knowledge and ability in a certain subject, as objectively as possible. Unless you're in a public speaking course, your public speaking skills should have as little bearing on your grades as possible.
      - collegeburner 4y ago
        no. every course should incorporate significant written and oral components because if you cannot adequately synthesize and communicate the information you're meant to be learning, that course is functionally useless. one of the important things i have learned is nobody cares what you know unless you can communicate it well.
        gjulianm 4y ago
        Teachers have to prepare their classes because, despite knowing the subject well, actually talking about something requires preparation. It’s unreasonable to ask students to not only study and understand the material, but also prepare all the course knowledge enough to be able to communicate that well when asked about a random part, and do that for all the classes they might have. If you wanted to give them time to prepare a specific topic it wouldn’t be an exam anymore. Synthesizing and communicating properly a subject is the work of a teacher. It takes practice, deep knowledge of the subject, extra materials. You’re asking students to both be students and teachers of all the material for a single exam.
        collegeburner 4y ago
  - aqsalose 4y ago
    Sure, extroverted students have some advantage. On the other hand, extroverted people have similar advantage in the real life. I myself am quite happy for every lesson where I was pushed to practice people-facing skills (presentations, demonstrations, etc). Even an introverted person can learn to talk about topic knowledgeably if they know it -- which often is valuable confidence-building experience to have. Despite the introversion, one can do it! If the professor - lecturer administering the test is any good, empty rhetoric won't help too much. If they are lazy, students one can try to give "answers" without showing what they don't know in written exams, too.
  - juve1996 4y ago
    Probably not true at the university level - they'll detect bullshit a mile away.
aredox 4y ago
Americans and others are just going to discover that they need to invest in education, as in: invest in educators.
ch4s3 4y ago
I had this for some classes in Spanish literature in college and I found it way easier than writing a long winded paper about some dull novel about an overbearing matriarch. My business classes similarly had presentations that were partially peer-graded and I really enjoyed those as well.
busyant 4y ago
> many of the exams are oral. I agree. But there is a "gold rush" out there in the academic world where the idea is to offload more and more work to "on-line." My son just started school at a respectable US university. Two of his five courses are entirely on-line. A third course (genetics) is done in person, but the exams and quizzes are done on-line. I overhead three undergraduates talking about how easy it is to defeat the anti-cheating software for their on-line courses ("The professors don't review the videos...Just hold your phone out of view of your laptop camera and google the answers...I've never been caught ...). It was disheartening and I told my son to avoid on-line classes in the future because he was just putting himself at a disadvantage.
- juve1996 4y ago
  Pretty much confirms what we already know: standards are declining, more unqualified students are attending university because the job market demands it, colleges make bank on tuition and don't want to stop the gravy train. Now online even offers another way for administrators to cut costs while reducing the quality - but no one really cares. Most students want their degree and want to get out now - not blaming them, they're playing the game.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
  Even a decade ago I was seeing obvious cheating when I was TAing classes. International students would hand in an essay with clearly broken english, then follow that up with essays with complex, well written english that was obviously not in their "voice" or even in the same intellectual ballpark as exhibited in the in-person class and discussions. Even pre-internet, essay writing was widely regarded as " library stenography" by students. The meat of the matter really comes down to the professors and how they approach the exams. Generalized essay prompts are hilariously easy to cheat on; complex hyper specific prompts that extend on something specifically discussed in the class are far harder. On-line classes, by their "mass distributional" nature (ie, save money by making them reusable) are almost by definition far more generalized than you would want.
  - tgv 4y ago
nmz 4y ago
With a massive caveat, it wouldn't scale. While anyone can go into khan academy and learn/perform any subject, having an actual person would be tremendously costly. It's strange, when computerized education appeared I thought the cost of education would plummet, now its going to go all the way up.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  you are looking at 2 different things we both call education but should have separated a long time ago. the cost of learning is almost unbeleivably lower than just 20, 10 years ago. the cost of credentialing might go up.
admissionsguy 4y ago
How much do the results correlate with the students physical attractiveness?
gjulianm 4y ago
I honestly hate oral exams. I had three for my master degree, in english (not my native language), in math-related courses. I underperformed them because of several reasons - Pressure to actually talk and perform. In a written exam I can stop, look at the paper and take my time to actually start. In an oral exam I have the professor looking at me. Less time to actually think. - It's harder to communicate orally with complex subjects than in written form. Add to that the extra cognitive load of not dealing with your native tongue. - Time constraints on oral exams punish students that don't learn everything by memory but can reason in real-time. I didn't know by heart a certain proof, I know for sure I could have done it in a written exam with time to spare (it wouldn't have been the first time) but I wasn't quick enough for an oral one. - Mental blocks are much harder in oral exams. Some times I blank out and forget something basic (e.g., the derivative of a logarithm). In a written exam I can stop, think, and solve it. In an oral exam, the "stopping" is already making you look like you don't know things, adding pressure that will make you underperform. Written exams have been the norm for decades for a reason. Far easier to actually ask the things you want, they scale far more easily, easier to correct and grade, and easier for students to practice and perform well.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > harder to communicate orally with complex subjects than in written form American oration is generally awful. Talent in it command a premium. Perhaps this is related to our lack of oral examination ? We’re more comfortable with written argument because that’s how we’re taught to think?
  - gjulianm 4y ago
    Well, it was in an Swiss university and I'm Spanish so I'm not sure if American oratorion had anything to do with it. But, in general, oral communication is harder than written. Written form allows you to take time to form sentences, correct mistakes, reorder thoughts, follow an outline... Oral communication, on the other hand, forces you to think and speak in parallel. It's always going to be harder.
    - 4y ago
bergenty 4y ago
As a kid, this would have been absolutely nerve wracking for many people. Especially if the oral exam was in front of the entire class.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
It depends on what you're trying to teach. Often the whole point is the writing. Being a good speaker is a relevant skill, but it's a different one.
tcmart14 4y ago
At least from my experience being a student in the US, we kind of do that, but it is separate. I had quiet a few assignments where I had to give a presentation of some kind. Where we mess up with this, it usually works out that kids make power points full of information and just read off the slides. Of course, this practice isn't exclusive to students, I've seen many presentations in academia, my time in the military, at technical talks, etc that do just this, read off a power point.

brianbreslin 4y ago

My father who is a college professor in his late 70s is starting to do this in the US as he found less correlation between a written assignment and students actually knowing what the material was. Forcing a presentation makes it harder for them to cheat.

n4r9 4y ago
On the other hand, it risks privileging students that are extroverted and skilled at using rhetoric to disguise ignorance.
- mannykannot 4y ago
  If students are successful at using rhetoric to disguise their ignorance from their teachers, we need to be looking into how teachers are selected, trained and compensated.
- staticautomatic 4y ago
  Only so long as the teacher can’t tell the difference.
- mountainb 4y ago
  Just like real life. When schools had more prestige, they also relied more heavily on intensive oral examinations. Some of the most prestigious schools in the world still rely heavily on intense oral examinations. Universities can also crib from how law school exams work if they want to still do written examinations.
  - foobarian 4y ago
    IIRC Harvard Business School tracks attendance, students have name plates, and get cold called.
    - criddell 4y ago
      I’m not sure you can do the cold calling thing at a public school. Everybody at HBS signed up for that, public school kids did not.
      - frostburg 4y ago
        Every school (and many university professors) does "cold calls" in Italy, as far as I know; scheduled oral examinations are the exception, not the rule, before university. Not knowing the answer at a random university lecture doesn't generally impact your grades, however, because in most cases those are 100% based on a final (often oral) exam. I wouldn't argue that it is a system without issues but it's still better than rote essay writing.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- account42 4y ago
  On the other hand, oral exams can be less stressful as long as the examiner is friendly as there can be opportunity to correct mistakes where you do know the subject matter but just had a brainfart. You also get a chance to spend more times / show off on the parts you do know better. I am very much not an extroverted person and in University written exams were almost always more stressful than oral ones as they try to cram as much as possible into into the time available or were too easy (so at the top end grading becomes very nitpicky) or too hard (which can be demoralizing if no one even manages to complete all questions). Oral exams have much more flexibility to adapt to the individual here.
  - gyy52380 4y ago
    I think this really depends on your specific university. At my university in Eastern Europe the teachers were bitter and overworked, and that really showed during oral examinations. Because of the high number students enrolled in the classes, almost all oral exams also featured a written component, very similar to a regular exam. Because of the unstructured nature of oral exams, you would have an arbitrary amount of time to solve it. After that the professor would make you elaborate some of your anwsers, or not, depending how he felt like. The students who performed best were indeed very extroverted and able to convince the professor that they actually meant something other than what they wrote. The professors also used these exams to give you an arbitrary grade for the subject, depending exclusively on your oral exam "performance". I remember having a high 90% grade in the written part of my Advanced Electronics class. The professor didn't feel I was confident enough in my answers during the oral exam, so he passed me with 1/30 points even though I answered most of the answers correct, thus bringing my grade down to barely a C. Oral exams sound great in theory but in practice they always felt somewhere between unfair and traumatizing. I much prefer the objectivity of written exams.
  - gjulianm 4y ago
    > On the other hand, oral exams can be less stressful as long as the examiner is friendly as there can be opportunity to correct mistakes where you do know the subject matter but just had a brainfart. You also get a chance to spend more times / show off on the parts you do know better. I don't agree with this at all. Even with a friendly examiner, they have far more presence than in a written exam. You are presenting and being actively judged, unlike in a written exam. Also, you'll spend more time on the parts you know worse precisely because you'll be slower, make more mistakes... > they try to cram as much as possible into into the time available or were too easy (so at the top end grading becomes very nitpicky) or too hard (which can be demoralizing if no one even manages to complete all questions). Oral exams have much more flexibility to adapt to the individual here. Badly adapted exams are a feature of the teacher, not the type of exam. If anything, oral exams are worse for more complex content, as they tend to be shorter in time.
- prepend 4y ago
  I don’t think extrovert is necessarily correlated with skilled speaker. I know lots of extroverts who are terrified of speaking in front of others and introverts who love it. I think this is easier for people who are good at speaking but I think exercises like this will develop the skill.
  - fullstop 4y ago
    > I don’t think extrovert is necessarily correlated with skilled speaker. My oldest is quite introverted but can somehow flip a switch internally and is excellent at public speaking. She's won a number of speech competitions and is far better at this sort of thing than I will ever be.
    - Auracle 4y ago
      I’m quite introverted and wasn’t at the level that your daughter is, but apparently did well enough at an impromptu speech in college that I had a very cute girl from the class look me up and add me on Facebook. I still absolutely hated doing it though.
      - fullstop 4y ago
        Please tell me that you made a move.
        Auracle 4y ago
        I was already dating someone. Oddly enough she married someone from my hometown. The college was 3.5 hours away from that town of ~2,000 and he didn't go to our college. If I ever bump in to one of them I'm going to need to ask how that came about.
        fullstop 4y ago
        I'll be honest I wanted to hear that the two of you met up, got married, and had a bunch of babies together. I guess your answer will have to do!
- sethammons 4y ago
  I loved the style of book report that we had with a high school English teacher. While the class was otherwise busy, the teacher called you up to report on your self-chosen-from-a-list book. The teacher opened the book to a page and would read a passage and ask questions about it like what are they talking about, what happened right before and after this. After a couple of passages at different spots, you got your grade. You are not feigning anyone familiar with the material.
- sroussey 4y ago
  Does not work with math and engineering. I had a very difficult electrical engineering course and the final was solving a problem on a whiteboard in the teachers office.
  - n4r9 4y ago
    Either there is no discussion with the teacher, in which case it might as well be done on paper at a desk; or there is discussion with the teacher, in which case students with more advanced social skills are often able to elicit more help without betraying that they lack knowledge or intelligence.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  good. youre right i got through a lot of presentations easier than other classmates but thats cause learning to present really well is an essential skill. students should be skilled at using rhetoric so i see that as a feature not a bug. everything else in life will reward being well spoken and outgoing, why shouldnt school as well?
  - gjulianm 4y ago
    School should be testing you for knowledge and ability in a certain subject, as objectively as possible. Unless you're in a public speaking course, your public speaking skills should have as little bearing on your grades as possible.
    - collegeburner 4y ago
      no. every course should incorporate significant written and oral components because if you cannot adequately synthesize and communicate the information you're meant to be learning, that course is functionally useless. one of the important things i have learned is nobody cares what you know unless you can communicate it well.
      - gjulianm 4y ago
        Teachers have to prepare their classes because, despite knowing the subject well, actually talking about something requires preparation. It’s unreasonable to ask students to not only study and understand the material, but also prepare all the course knowledge enough to be able to communicate that well when asked about a random part, and do that for all the classes they might have. If you wanted to give them time to prepare a specific topic it wouldn’t be an exam anymore. Synthesizing and communicating properly a subject is the work of a teacher. It takes practice, deep knowledge of the subject, extra materials. You’re asking students to both be students and teachers of all the material for a single exam.
        collegeburner 4y ago
- aqsalose 4y ago
  Sure, extroverted students have some advantage. On the other hand, extroverted people have similar advantage in the real life. I myself am quite happy for every lesson where I was pushed to practice people-facing skills (presentations, demonstrations, etc). Even an introverted person can learn to talk about topic knowledgeably if they know it -- which often is valuable confidence-building experience to have. Despite the introversion, one can do it! If the professor - lecturer administering the test is any good, empty rhetoric won't help too much. If they are lazy, students one can try to give "answers" without showing what they don't know in written exams, too.
- juve1996 4y ago
  Probably not true at the university level - they'll detect bullshit a mile away.

aredox 4y ago

Americans and others are just going to discover that they need to invest in education, as in: invest in educators.

ch4s3 4y ago

I had this for some classes in Spanish literature in college and I found it way easier than writing a long winded paper about some dull novel about an overbearing matriarch. My business classes similarly had presentations that were partially peer-graded and I really enjoyed those as well.

busyant 4y ago

> many of the exams are oral. I agree. But there is a "gold rush" out there in the academic world where the idea is to offload more and more work to "on-line." My son just started school at a respectable US university. Two of his five courses are entirely on-line. A third course (genetics) is done in person, but the exams and quizzes are done on-line. I overhead three undergraduates talking about how easy it is to defeat the anti-cheating software for their on-line courses ("The professors don't review the videos...Just hold your phone out of view of your laptop camera and google the answers...I've never been caught ...). It was disheartening and I told my son to avoid on-line classes in the future because he was just putting himself at a disadvantage.

juve1996 4y ago
Pretty much confirms what we already know: standards are declining, more unqualified students are attending university because the job market demands it, colleges make bank on tuition and don't want to stop the gravy train. Now online even offers another way for administrators to cut costs while reducing the quality - but no one really cares. Most students want their degree and want to get out now - not blaming them, they're playing the game.
beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
Even a decade ago I was seeing obvious cheating when I was TAing classes. International students would hand in an essay with clearly broken english, then follow that up with essays with complex, well written english that was obviously not in their "voice" or even in the same intellectual ballpark as exhibited in the in-person class and discussions. Even pre-internet, essay writing was widely regarded as " library stenography" by students. The meat of the matter really comes down to the professors and how they approach the exams. Generalized essay prompts are hilariously easy to cheat on; complex hyper specific prompts that extend on something specifically discussed in the class are far harder. On-line classes, by their "mass distributional" nature (ie, save money by making them reusable) are almost by definition far more generalized than you would want.
- tgv 4y ago

nmz 4y ago

With a massive caveat, it wouldn't scale. While anyone can go into khan academy and learn/perform any subject, having an actual person would be tremendously costly. It's strange, when computerized education appeared I thought the cost of education would plummet, now its going to go all the way up.

collegeburner 4y ago
you are looking at 2 different things we both call education but should have separated a long time ago. the cost of learning is almost unbeleivably lower than just 20, 10 years ago. the cost of credentialing might go up.

admissionsguy 4y ago

How much do the results correlate with the students physical attractiveness?

gjulianm 4y ago

I honestly hate oral exams. I had three for my master degree, in english (not my native language), in math-related courses. I underperformed them because of several reasons - Pressure to actually talk and perform. In a written exam I can stop, look at the paper and take my time to actually start. In an oral exam I have the professor looking at me. Less time to actually think. - It's harder to communicate orally with complex subjects than in written form. Add to that the extra cognitive load of not dealing with your native tongue. - Time constraints on oral exams punish students that don't learn everything by memory but can reason in real-time. I didn't know by heart a certain proof, I know for sure I could have done it in a written exam with time to spare (it wouldn't have been the first time) but I wasn't quick enough for an oral one. - Mental blocks are much harder in oral exams. Some times I blank out and forget something basic (e.g., the derivative of a logarithm). In a written exam I can stop, think, and solve it. In an oral exam, the "stopping" is already making you look like you don't know things, adding pressure that will make you underperform. Written exams have been the norm for decades for a reason. Far easier to actually ask the things you want, they scale far more easily, easier to correct and grade, and easier for students to practice and perform well.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> harder to communicate orally with complex subjects than in written form American oration is generally awful. Talent in it command a premium. Perhaps this is related to our lack of oral examination ? We’re more comfortable with written argument because that’s how we’re taught to think?
- gjulianm 4y ago
  Well, it was in an Swiss university and I'm Spanish so I'm not sure if American oratorion had anything to do with it. But, in general, oral communication is harder than written. Written form allows you to take time to form sentences, correct mistakes, reorder thoughts, follow an outline... Oral communication, on the other hand, forces you to think and speak in parallel. It's always going to be harder.
  - 4y ago

bergenty 4y ago

As a kid, this would have been absolutely nerve wracking for many people. Especially if the oral exam was in front of the entire class.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

It depends on what you're trying to teach. Often the whole point is the writing. Being a good speaker is a relevant skill, but it's a different one.

tcmart14 4y ago

At least from my experience being a student in the US, we kind of do that, but it is separate. I had quiet a few assignments where I had to give a presentation of some kind. Where we mess up with this, it usually works out that kids make power points full of information and just read off the slides. Of course, this practice isn't exclusive to students, I've seen many presentations in academia, my time in the military, at technical talks, etc that do just this, read off a power point.