> Have you taken an oral exam? I have, yes. My university experience ran the gamut, in that I had both classes in a massive lecture hall of hundreds of student

> Have you taken an oral exam? I have, yes. My university experience ran the gamut, in that I had both classes in a massive lecture hall of hundreds of students where most never spoke a word to the professor and all exams were done via scantron, as well as small graduate courses of around 4 students where the entire class was oral exams and one-on-one demonstrations and group discussions. The smallest course was only available at all because of a particularly passionate professor who insisted on holding it, and the class was never available during semesters where he wasn't available, because nobody else was willing to put in the work to personally administer the class. Notably, all those courses cost about the same amount of money per credit hour from my perspective, so the university was making orders of magnitude more money on the large class (where I can't see oral exams being feasible without significant investment) than they were making off the small class. > You can delegate to grad students, but the same can be said of oral exams It's much harder to delegate an oral exam than a written one. As you've mentioned, oral exams combine administration with grading, which means the grad students who are delegated to need to be able to administer the exam (ie, effectively probe the knowledge of each examinee) as well as evaluate their responses. In a written exam, the grad student only needs to evaluate the responses, usually against a set of predetermined criteria since the structure of the questions is set in stone. None of what universities are moving towards is better, but I fail to see how it isn't cheaper.