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Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

nc55g3g 2mo ago
Denmark: "You must now verbally defend your essay." Students: sweating nervously "Uh, well, you see... the AI wrote it, but I agree with what it said?"
AverageSavage 2mo ago
Brillant! <- I had AI write that.
- trueno 2mo ago
  You've touched on something real here
ModernMech 2mo ago
This is a good move. I teach a summer async remote course that's ending next week, but I'm giving all the students incompletes until they come back to campus and take an in-person exam the first week of classes. All homework is worth a marginal amount, and if they fail the final they fail the class. I'm not going to spend my effort policing whether they're using AI or not in their class work because it's a losing battle. At the end of the day, they can either demonstrate mastery of the material at an exam or not. It makes the exams higher stakes, but that's where we are.
- glimshe 2mo ago
  I'd never pay to have you as a teacher, I'm sorry. Maybe your move makes a sense for the reputation of your university's degree, but as a student willing to pay to learn remotely, I'd not accept to be treated like children.
  - williamcotton 2mo ago
    Are you after learning or an accredited degree?
  - throw_m239339 2mo ago
    Well that's part of the issue with for profit education, if the student pays significant money for tuition, is he a customer or a student?
    - majormajor 2mo ago
      "The student is the customer" is a stupid metaphor that only caught on because a lot of people would rather just bring in dollars than worry about "are we actually teaching anything?"
      - hackyhacky 2mo ago
        It's not a metaphor. They are literally the customer.
        otterley 2mo ago
        They're a customer in the same way that a martial arts student is a customer: getting your butt kicked is literally what you're paying for.
        hackyhacky 2mo ago
        Sure. And just like with a martial arts student, if you kick their butt too hard, you will lose the customer and might get sued.
        otterley 2mo ago
        Sued for giving out hard work assignments? That doesn't sound plausible. Under what theory would a student have a case?
        hackyhacky 2mo ago
        Teachers and school districts are often sued by irate parents when their little golden angel gets a bad grade. Schools are therefore incentivized to allow all students to pass, regardless of ability. https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/suing-over-bad-grades/ https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/suing-over-bad-gra... https://www.npr.org/2007/03/13/8278150/parent-sues-school-over-students-poor-grade https://www.npr.org/2007/03/13/8278150/parent-sues-school-ov...
  - trentor 2mo ago
    You can learn remotely in his class. That's the whole point he is trying to make. Hybrid does not mean fully remote. If you want fully remote take a full remote class.
  - pjmorris 2mo ago
    Do you think 'At the end of the day, they can either demonstrate mastery of the material at an exam or not' is a reasonable expectation for an adult? If so, how would an adult be treated while still expecting them to demonstrate mastery? If not, what do you think a reasonable expectation for an adult should be?
  - pdhborges 2mo ago
    Are you willing to pay to learn remotely from a university with crappy reputation?
  - cortesoft 2mo ago
    If you only care about the learning, then you could just take the incomplete. You don’t somehow lose the knowledge you gained. The only cost of an incomplete is it doesn’t help towards a degree, but a degree is just a signaling mechanism. If you want to be able to use their degree to signal something to someone, you will have to jump through their hoops.
  - majormajor 2mo ago
    Adults don't have to prove things? As AI eats up the need for half-assed "I googled a few things and wrote something up and then slacked off for five hours" white-collar-paperwork jobs, it's gonna be pretty hard for people not willing or able to demonstrate that they can do anything that couldn't just be fully done with an "agent" instead.
  - bonoboTP 2mo ago
    Regular graded assignments is the "treated like children" version. The adult treatment is that you can come to class if you want, you can do the assignments if you want, but if not, that's fine too. There is one test at the end, and it's your responsibility to prepare for it as you want. You manage your own time, we offer consultation, lectures, assignments, tutorials etc. but you can reject all of this and learn the material from some other textbook, and as long as you've mastered the material, you'll get a good grade at the exam. This is how German universities work, for the most part.
    - fluidcruft 2mo ago
      The problem is the vicious feedback nowadays of online student evaluations of professors. Professors that are rigorous get complaints and low rankings, kids don't sign up for their sections etc. Kids (parents) pay the administration and the administration wants to keep the customer happy. The only real answer are standardized exams (such as licensure exams) which are beyond parent pocketbook capture.
      - bonoboTP 2mo ago
        Or like Europe. You don't pay tuition, but if you slack off, and don't progress properly, you only have a limited number of exam retries and limited number of funded semesters. If you fail, you're out, choose another profession. You're not a customer, you're someone who is trying to prove themselves and get certified by experts on their knowledge. The "customer" of the university is whoever will glance at the degree paper and tries to ascertain the skill/knowledge level of the outgoing student. They have to give a good signal there. The reason this doesn't work in the US, is because they want mediocre children of rich parents to be pushed through, because college is a networking and social class-based finishing school, not a place for acquiring knowledge. (Also, there should be electives, but the rigorous backbone of a degree should be mandatory, so "students won't choose this course" doesn't come up.)
        otterley 2mo ago
        > The reason this doesn't work in the US, is because they want mediocre children of rich parents to be pushed through, because college is a networking and social class-based finishing school, not a place for acquiring knowledge. Out of curiosity, which US university did you attend? I went to a well-known and highly-regarded public university in California, and they absolutely did not coddle their students. Poor-performing students regularly washed out.
  - pbasista 2mo ago
    > I'd not accept to be treated like children. What is your expectation from such a class? What are you hoping to get out of it? If you merely want a tutor that will help you out navigate a topic you are interested in, with no strings attached, then sure, yes. No need to take exams. But if the goal is to get a formally recognized degree in some topic, then you will need to accept that there will be oversight over how you understand that topic. Because the institutions granting those degrees need to sign them off. And if they care about their reputation, they would be interested in signing off only on those students, who actually understand the topic. So there will need to be exams. In the AI era, it is close to impossible to guarantee that a remote exam will accurately evaluate your understanding of a topic. So the exams would need to be carried out in person. There is nothing children-specific in using such approach. It is merely one of the few still somewhat objective ways to actually test people's understanding of some topic.
- Discordian93 2mo ago
  I hope at least the homework is good prep for the exams, otherwise if its grade value is marginal there's little point from the PoV of a student that just needs to pass the class to take it seriously
  - ModernMech 2mo ago
    Oh yes, the exam is basically: take your actual homework, augment it according to this spec. If they've built their homework themselves, they should be well prepared. If it's the first time they're looking at their own work, which has happened, they probably won't finish in time. It helps to be fluent in the codebase for a timed exam.
azalemeth 2mo ago
This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's very apparent to both student and teachers how well a topic is understood. Marks are rarely contested and in my experience most students think the process is fair. Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....
- viccis 2mo ago
  >Of course, woe betide those with social phobias I can see this being a problem in the US when it comes to "accommodations" in general. Students with an ADHD diagnosis can claim it causes just about any difficulty and get accommodations for it. The local (top ranked, but everyone's seen all the stories coming out of the Ivies...) college here gives students with ADHD double time on exams and has them take it in a special disabilities proctoring center where it's a struggle to get the staff there to even enforce those time limits. Obviously this also makes it infinitely easier to outright cheat as well. Not a chance you will get past the "my ADHD makes it hard for me to think about these things verbally" challenge at institutions like this.
  - bonoboTP 2mo ago
    European universities also have accommodations and extra time etc. And yes it's an arms race. Though at some point it will simply inflate away the value of the degree, but educators will stand there baffled, not understanding how it could happen.
  - eutropia 2mo ago
    as someone with ADHD who always finished exams first or was the designated spokesperson for group presentations... I have no idea why you'd want to be taking a test a second longer than you already have to. Either you know the material or you don't, anything taking a lot of time is borderline stuff where you're scrapping for points you might not deserve in the first place lol
behnamoh 2mo ago
Denmark is a very small country and what works there doesn’t necessarily work at the scale of the US or China.
- toad_tyrrant 2mo ago
  Why not? This is such a thought terminating statement. No actual reason.
  - behnamoh 2mo ago
    Tell me you're not a programmer w/o telling me. What works at scale can be fundamentally different than what works in a small startup (Denmark).
    - halperter 2mo ago
      Could you point out a reason why education, which can be standardized at least to a state scale¹, cannot be standardized to the state scale utilizing oral defenses? Also, can be ≠ is. Not everything is a startup lol ¹https://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/ https://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/
    - toad_tyrrant 2mo ago
      You said it can be fundamentally different, and of course it can. But “it doesn’t scale” isn’t an argument by itself. In many areas, scale actually creates efficiencies. You’d need to explain what specifically about the larger scale makes the Danish approach unworkable in the U.S
    - flaunf221 2mo ago
      If in person exams are seemingly impossible in US due to scale, we have to conclude that before internet US had no education?
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throwatdem12311 2mo ago
My entire university education was evaluated mostly by proctored closed book exams and oral defenses. AI proof 10 years before AI.
millicentricism 2mo ago
Oral Defences have a long established tradition in Denmark, but recently there’s been real cut back on this as a money saving exercise. So both teachers and Students are familiar with this form of examination. So for a dane this reads like “back to the old way”, rather than anything new or novel.
amelius 2mo ago
A nice plot twist would be if those tests were administered by an AI.
- deadbabe 2mo ago
  At some point they will have to be won't they? Too many students. At scale, I imagine something similar to the Baseline Test in Bladerunner 2049.
- jimbokun 2mo ago
  More like a tired trope.
lacoolj 2mo ago
Why is everyone in this thread comparing this to a University But yeah, this is a good step. Homework is also becoming obsolete at this point. If they can't do it with pen and paper in class, there's no reliable way to evaluate work anymore.
- trostaft 2mo ago
  I'm teaching a university math course next semester and I've been messing around with a solution to this that my old analysis professor used to employ. Every week, they take home a handful of theory questions. These aren't turned in for credit. But, every week, there'll be a short quiz where one of those questions are asked verbatim, along with a small follow up. That felt like a very natural solution to me. Of course, worst case scenario, they just blindly generate and memorize the proofs without thinking. But I think the follow ups will catch them in that case. Moreover, I choose to believe that >90% of my students are willing to at least put in the work of scrutinizing those proofs which is honestly not bad exercise in its own right. I would love to do oral exams directly, the logistics with the number of students I have just make that hard. I know we're trialing it with the less populated special topics courses.
  - rf_physics 2mo ago
    This follow up idea is a fun one! Not likely I'll have to be teaching a course like this again, but I will suggest it to some people I know.
- jimbokun 2mo ago
  Only as an honor system for students who want to learn the material. But worthless for assessments and assigning grades.
solenoid0937 2mo ago
This is a nightmare for students that don't think on their feet.
- camphy 2mo ago
  Yeah as much as I like the idea, I know there will be some brilliant and driven students who would have a hard time with this due to temperament. For me, if I’m excited about something, I can talk for hours. Maybe not so for everyone though. Then again, not all brilliant and driven students test well either, so… pick your poison?
- otterley 2mo ago
  Can you explain why? As I understand it, you're supposed to be able to talk about the work in which you already invested the mental energy to write. Writing involves much more "brain work" than speaking, so if you've truly written the work in question, you should be capable of speaking about it -- unless you have some sort of disability, in which case, there are probably alternative avenues.
- BlackjackCF 2mo ago
  This is definitely something you can't force onto students on a whim. This is a something that can be taught and worked up to though.
- deleted 2mo ago
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- silversmith 2mo ago
  If you don't have enough of a mastery over a subject to rapidly respond, maybe you are not fit to pass exam certifying your mastery over a subject.
  - solenoid0937 2mo ago
    I know world-leading experts in their field that avoid oral debates precisely because they don't think on their feet.
schroeding 2mo ago
I find it quite surprising that Danish high school students (the article isn't about university) apparently did write digital exams with internet access until now, so basically open book.
- pdhborges 2mo ago
  I'm also surprised. In Portugal primary, middle and high school tests and exams are all proctored and the vast majority of them written by hand.
camphy 2mo ago
I wish we were doing this in the US even before AI was an issue. I suspect it would reorient students to their work in some pretty cool ways. I mean, it might feel like torture for some and maybe that’s not so much a bad thing. I’m sure I’m not thinking of some downsides to this too, but it seems like such a great counter against “factory” schooling. Of course, this could be a lot more work for faculty and could be hard to keep up with a huge student population. Again, maybe a feature more than a bug.
PEe9bB7D 2mo ago
Oral exams were the norm when I studied. Even for technical topics.
subhobroto 2mo ago
The more I read about articles like these, I grow even more convinced that the education industry as a whole, regardless of the country or stature, has kind of lost their plot. Sometimes I even wonder if this is the outcome of sheer laziness, fear or both. When I speak to professors, teachers and students - It's also surprising that "top tier" institutions are fighting AI harder (outside extremely specific courses like Harvard’s flagship CS50, MBA courses at Wharton (UPenn) and MIT) while "bottom tier" institutions are completely embracing it and rebuilding their curriculum around it. One CS professor at a "bottom tier" CSU mentioned to me that he's actively going completely "open book using AI" - students are allowed to use anything they want from Claude to Codex to OpenCode to finish assignments but the assignments have now changed from "blurt out quicksort" to "let's sort N natural numbers in a cache efficient way using least amount of resources". I would hire the latter over the former anytime. I am tired of interviewing candidates who can shit out quicksort before I can even finish my sentence but stare at me dumbfounded when I ask them to sort people's name serialized in unicode. In my opinion, the bulk of traditional education has been a mix of memorization of facts, knowing inference rules, and applying inference rules to those facts, coupled with recall. Before the age of LLMs, only very expensive-to-build rule-based expert systems were able to replicate that functionality. Humans were just simply cheaper and way more reliable. In 2026, Frontier models are exceedingly, across the board, across industries, breaking records and challenging those notions on cost, capability and sophistication. Trying to replicate how education used to operate pre-frontier LLMs is like forcing people to farm by hand in the age of automated tractors that have LIDAR, Vision, RTK on board. I'm not discounting other elements of learning like collaborative debate, clinical/lab work, Socratic reasoning, emotional intelligence and the development of a professional network - but I argue these skills are not limited to a school or university setting. Infact, a lot of this is distorted in a school or university setting compared to the real world. I have been filing my own taxes, including complexities like equity, real estate and business income for over a decade now, so it's not just a simple 1040 and 540. Reading through IRS documentation, talking to EAs and CPAs to fill in ambiguities and gaps was pretty expensive in terms of time and money. Both Claude Opus and GPT 5.5 now, as of 2026, answer all my tax questions correctly. Those thousands of dollars in time and money I had spent has been replaced by a single $20 subscription. Unless tax codes drastically change every year, that $20 is a one time cost. If I were to begin my tax journey in 2026, I would never had to spend those dollars: dozens of tax professionals are out of a job - all their education is for nothing. It's entirely irrelevant whether they passed their exams by carving answers out on granite, taking their exams in a jail cell on an island proctored by Catholic Nuns under the watchful guard of automatic machine guns manned by T-1000s, I just don't need them anymore. For my usecase, these humans and their credentials provide 0 additional value over a one-time $20 expense, no matter how complicated it was for them to get their credential and what complex interpretive dance they had to do to impress the people awarding their grades. All this "reject AI, do it by hand" is just insanity at worst and laziness at best. That said, I'm personally unsure what the future of education in the age of tractors is like but removing weeds, planting seeds, watering them, all by hand is certainly not it. It's my understanding that most countries - developed or developing - are bottlenecked on educating their masses due to lack of qualified teachers. That's a bandwidth problem. Having those teachers listen to oral arguments from a handful of students is not solving the core bandwidth problem. All these shenanigans is doing a disservice to the public.
datahack 2mo ago
This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments. But what it does threaten to do is effectively abandon all the efficiencies of the written word. When higher education evolved into a mass system in the 1800s and into the 1900s, pure oral examination was looked at as super inefficient. A written paper could be handed in and graded without lining everyone up in front of a panel. The oral system scales poorly. One examiner can only hear so many students in a day. There are damn good reasons Medieval universities were small and modern ones are not. Requiring every major paper to be defended live reintroduces the bottleneck that written exams were designed to escape. Accessibility takes a hit too. Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective? This does not seem very logical, or sensitive. So while it’s nice that academics are rediscovering the old ways, I don’t really see this as a scalable answer to raising education levels for the masses, but more of a knee jerk way to try to bypass the obvious technological disruption by returning to non-scalable, inaccessible ways of doing things that our ancestors abandoned for a reason. It has its place for graduate students and smaller volume education systems. It’s fine for keeping the ivory tower clean. But it’s not the answer to expanding education to everyone and taking advantage of the technological disruption to advance education and learning throughout greater humanity, which is what AI definitely possesses as a possibility.
- altairprime 2mo ago
  It’s a good answer for keeping online education honest. It doesn’t need to be applied to all in-person schools, where teachers distribute spot checks across the course relatively evenly, but it makes perfect sense in conjunction with online testing. You only have to challenge one essay per student per term to catch cheaters with a near-perfect success rate. Assuming a 12 week course with 36 students, that’s qty.3-4 of teacher:student one on one meetings per week for the term; I think that’s doable. If you’ve oversold your teachers and have more than 36 students per, guess you’ll have to increase your labor expenses :D
snapetom 2mo ago
This is great. Sorry, but the Western World has to stop normalizing extreme introvertism. Humans are social. We rely on communication and cooperation to survive. Allowing kids to shelter themselves from interaction and communication during crucial development stages will only hamper them in life.
ryanhecht 2mo ago
This just feels like good educational practice too? I remember really enjoying TA'ing as an undergrad for courses I took the previous year, because THAT'S when I felt I _really_ learned the material. Likewise, when I was a lab consultant, I felt like advising others was when the concepts of Linux/systems administration _really_ sunk in. I always crammed the bare minimum for any kind of assessment (by the end of college I was actively avoiding any classes with final exams), but when I need to be able to teach someone else or explain my understanding in a live environment? That's when I _actually_ learn.
scoofy 2mo ago
I had to do an oral defense of my thesis in graduate school. When you've spent months and months writing something extremely obscure... well, I'd hope that it's not that difficult.
- jimbokun 2mo ago
  You suddenly realize the foremost expert on the research in your dissertation…is you.
  - scoofy 2mo ago
    Yes! A fun anecdote from my defense was that this element of logic "did not exist before some time" or something. One of my citations was a book from like, the 1700's or something, and it absolutely blew away one of the committee members that I'd found it. He asked me "how on earth did you find this reference?" and I just told him that I look at all the math/logic libraries in Boston I had access to, I looked up all their logic books that predated the cut off I was looking for, and I skimmed them. I didn't even have to leave my university's library, because one of the first five books had the counter-factual I was looking for. Sure, it was a rare book and I had read it in a special room, but it wasn't particularly hard to find. Before that defense, I was 100% the only person alive with that information.
la64710 2mo ago
This is the way
akurilin 2mo ago
It feels like systems like the Maturita' final multi-day exam in Italy do a pretty good job at providing students with a standardized, state-supervised process for demonstrating one's competence by the end of high school. No computers, you're under the watchful eye of your teachers the whole time, nobody knows what's going to be on the exam until the day of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matura#Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matura#Italy It's time consuming and nerve-wracking, but it feels fair.
willmeyers 2mo ago
In my high school English class (like 10 years ago) my teacher assigned readings and called on a random person each day to give an overview of a section. He basically quizzed you in front of the class on themes, plots, etc. It was very effective at getting me to read and care for that class, because if you just sat up there and didn't know anything you'd lose marks on participation (and look kind of dumb). Not sure if/when/why oral presentations and public speaking are no longer got prioritized.
BrandoElFollito 2mo ago
This is and have always been the case for Masters and above across Europe. It varies for Licentiates. It is also often the case for exams in majors (they are often oral). So nothing innovative there
- izacus 2mo ago
  In my part of Europe oral exams have been a staple even in highschool and across unis. I was pretty surprised when I've seen that other parts of the world don't complement written testing with oral understanding checks.
jsrozner 2mo ago
As a thought experiment: In-person testing or oral defense approaches work until we get implants. If people have implants, what then? Demand that the implant be turned off? Demand that the implant's data connection be turned off? In the latter case, the person with more storage or a better local model wins. In the long run, in the AGI world, if everyone has implants, then everyone is roughly equal because computer-aided computation will be better than what any individual can do. Those without implants are screwed. (I don't want an implant; nor do I want others to have implants.)
- para_parolu 2mo ago
  Thos whole debate is happening because people think a degree matters. Because getting a piece of paper is more important than knowledge. Students will continue to cheat (AI or not) as long as the goal is to get a stamp.
sudo_cowsay 2mo ago
Couldn't students ask AI to make a oral defense plan?
- oynqr 2mo ago
  Did you know that there is a foolproof way to cheat on any exam? You can just store the answers in your brain. They won't even notice you cheated.
  - sudo_cowsay 2mo ago
    Woah! Really! I never knew that!
  - audreyfei 2mo ago
    maybe the policy will succeed in encouraging learning for most students (at least I hope so!!); otherwise some might still rely on ai because of the trust they've built up with it, a lack of connection to and therefore faith in the info they're expected to just memorize, low confidence in their abilities, etc
- hx8 2mo ago
  At this point you're just describing learning using buzz words.
- ungovernableCat 2mo ago
  Of course they could, in fact it'll probably be great prep if they read it and understand it instead of just memorising the answer. If they just memorise the answer any smart teacher can trip them up by just rephrasing things or developing tangents to see understanding. In school before exams, I'd often make little cheat sheets about things that you'd need to memorise like formulas for areas and volumes or certain physics equations (we weren't allowed any reference material for that on exams). The very act of writing them all down before the exam would often boost my memory enough to the point I'd just recall them.
thomashabets2 2mo ago
That's going to be a hard test. Have you ever heard Danish?
thoughtpeddler 2mo ago
As an educator myself, this quarter for the first time for my course's final project, I've switched to actually asking my students to provide an "AI Authenticity Audit" of their (project-relevant) chats in the construction of said projects. All my students' output over the last two years went from pre-AI level quality to boardroom-ready polish, and I'm actually more interested to see how they arrive at an outcome rather than the final output itself - focusing on their questioning, curating, editing, and iterating process. Didn't think we'd get to somewhere like this so soon, but here we are. Strange, but I'm trying it out.
- tempestn 2mo ago
  IMO this kind of thing adds work and stress for the best students. If I'd been faced with something like this while I was in school I would have felt the need to basically curate a parallel construction AI discussion, knowing it would be judged. I understand the theory that, in the age of AI, the prompts are more interesting than the outputs, but I'm not convinced this is the way. Things like the Denmark approach (and/or in-person written responses) seem like a better direction. Treat take-home writing the same as we've treated take-home math questions - as useful practice (for those who choose to actually engage with it), but not a significant input to grading.
  - thoughtpeddler 2mo ago
    Yes, I thought about that, and which is why I'm just running this as a pilot for this quarter to see how it goes and I'm not particularly attached to it if feedback/results are mixed. But that said, there are real constraints on my ability to supervise students with in-person examination, but that is more a problem with how my society funds and cares about education. We are forced to take approaches that 'work at scale', hence experiments like this. But truly, reception was positive when this was introduced, because students too want to be held to a good standard and don't want others to get credit for not doing the work toward achieving the learning outcomes like the most honest ones.
Papazsazsa 2mo ago
Watching tech cannibalize itself is about as entertaining as watching Hollywood do it in the mid-2000s.
userbinator 2mo ago
It was already long-standing practice, when I was teaching many many years ago, to interview suspected cheaters (it's usually quite obvious) to see if they actually knew what they claimed they knew.
- singingtoday 2mo ago
  Only the dumb ones are obvious. In my school (SFU/BC) most of the students in almost all of my classes cheated. VERY FEW got caught. I heard instructors say all too often that it was obvious when somebody was cheating, but somehow they missed the guy paying his cousin to write the final.
  - singingtoday 2mo ago
    I should add, this was for CS. I don't know about the other programs.
  - userbinator 2mo ago
    Sometimes it's just an empty threat, and instructors don't want to deal with the rest of the fallout. Even more so these days with the infusion of identity politics in education.
ajsnigrutin 2mo ago
In slovenia, at least in most engineering colleges, every exam was a combination of written + oral, way before AI even existed.
Halan 2mo ago
I’ve studied CS in Italy and most if not all exams were both written and oral some also had labs. I thought it was the same for other degrees too.
dystopiandevel 2mo ago
This is a great strategy. It is something I do in code reviews as a senior developer. There has been observed longer code reviews for seniors and this kind of approach keeps it manageable.
leros 2mo ago
This is how we used to grade labs when I was a TA in college. Students worked in groups of two and showed up with a working project to get graded. Afterwards, we'd ask the two students questions and it was extremely obvious if one or both of them didn't work on it.
IFC_LLC 2mo ago
I mean, this is pretty much the easiest way of handling the problem. When I was teaching in a university the easiest thing to test someone's understanding was a simple question: "Explain me how would you use this in a day-to-day situation." If the guy knows his business, he'll go on a long lecture obsessing over every new feature of C# 2.0 or PHP 3. He would give you all the differences between Firefox 3.5.1 and IE 6 with Maxthon. (Goddamn I'm freaking old) Should you not find a spark of interest but just random mumbo-jumbo of words that don't constitute sentences, you can clearly see that there is no understanding present in the subject. In this case you work as a teacher, helping the guy to figure out what he does not understand in a subject and simplifying things for him till this clicks. After that he will be able to talk about said subject for hours with gusto.
biffles 2mo ago
One step closer to mentats.
audreyfei 2mo ago
The Conversation has an article that supports raising expectations for students, given that they have access to AI https://theconversation.com/mit-researchers-say-using-chatgpt-can-rot-your-brain-the-truth-is-a-little-more-complicated-259450 https://theconversation.com/mit-researchers-say-using-chatgp...
agumonkey 2mo ago
Millions of students are now donating to neuralink so they can have stealth LLM answers on the fly. Teachers will have to count the number of load bearing per paragraph.
paulorlando 2mo ago
Good to see. Related, I've moved to requiring regular in-class handwritten quizzes. Just a blank piece of paper to start, with the questions on the board. The practice forces students to recognize whether they are learning specific topics.
nrvn 2mo ago
In my uni years bachelors, masters and PhDs required thorough research resulting in a huge opus printed and stitched together but the only thing that really mattered was the presentation of the work in front of the committee and oral defenses. To this day I have been living in full confidence that this is the academic standard that has been in place and effective (with variations) over centuries, if not millenias… Even intermediate exams were a combinations of practical work in some written form and the theoretical grill sessions in the end of every semester. All in all, if I had to put a professor’s hat today I would not give a sh.. if my students would use LLMs to write text. What would matter (and what does for me as a hiring manager at $WORK) and a human being with decency is the results of the _natural neural network_ training so to speak. IF whatever prompts and interactions with LLMs result in sharp knowledge of the subject and ability to apply the knowledge to solving real problems, well done and congrats!
Daviey 2mo ago
I'm quite impressed with the Hungarian system, for 18-19 year old school leavers, where every subject is split 50/50 between: - Írásbeli (written) - standardised written exam, centrally set and marked - Szóbeli (oral) - the panel interview The oral (szóbeli) has: - A committee of 2-3 teachers sits as a panel - The student draws a topic at random from a list - They get prep time (usually 15-20 mins) - They present their answer to the panel - The panel asks follow-up questions and probes understanding
aborsy 2mo ago
The problem with oral exam is that it’s done serially student by student, which can be infeasible with large classes. The grading is also highly subjective. Written exams are also not best suited to project-based classes. What’s the best way to grade students in classes with coding projects?
- whyenot 2mo ago
  Its serial nature also means that an evaluator's standards can drift from students with early exams to those with later exams. Oral exams can introduce issues of sex and ethnic biasing.
  - p-e-w 2mo ago
    Or just regular personal biasing, which is just as unfair but doesn’t receive government protection even in theory.
  - xboxnolifes 2mo ago
    Evaluation drift happens with written exams too. They are graded serially.
- pelagicAustral 2mo ago
  Arguably, the problem with higher education is one of volume.
jojobas 2mo ago
Somehow Russian technical universities were never relying on written work, there is some, but even that is is delivered in person with the tute teacher asking this and that. Tangentially, the market for uni assignments (mostly humanities) for pay was huge before AI.
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jimnotgym 2mo ago
Side note/ anecdote. When I was in school there was a maths aural test. The teacher read out questions and you wrote the answers, with no calculator. Basically a stupid name for a mental arithmetic test. The funny thing was the teachers were so at pains to differentiate between two words that sound basically the same in our local accent, aural and oral, that they insisted on pronouncing aural as "ow-eral' the ow being pronounced like a pain reaction sound. The smarter kids took to teasing the teacher with words like aura and aurora, and asking how to pronounce them...
- Ylpertnodi 2mo ago
  Oral and 'ow-erall' are both used where I am.
dyauspitr 2mo ago
From my conversation with some undergraduates, 99% of people are using LLMs for any applicable assignment.
golem14 2mo ago
Fun story: Final oral exam (in history, I believe -- a thing back then), I took a whole A4 paper and turned it into hundreds of little balls in front of 3 teachers over the duration of the oral exam. I had no idea I was doing this until one of the teacher pointed to the heap in front of me, but it saved my bacon as I did otherwise well.
azhenley 2mo ago
I wrote about assessing students in the era of AI from when I was teaching at Carnegie Mellon: https://austinhenley.com/blog/aihomework.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/aihomework.html
Ozzie-D 2mo ago
[flagged]
molybd3num 2mo ago
in the french CPGEs they have you make a mini research project to be presented in front of 2/3 judges at the end of the 2 years, each year has it's own theme (this year it's efficiency/optimisation) thankfully it doesn't need to be very deep, but it has to tie somewhat into the curriculum which can be annoying
fennecbutt 2mo ago
Good! Prevents AI being used to one shot the writing and helps them practice public speaking as well (even for people like me who hate public speaking).
humam_alhusaini 2mo ago
Seems inefficient, why not just distribute a version history with the document?

Denmark: "You must now verbally defend your essay." Students: sweating nervously "Uh, well, you see... the AI wrote it, but I agree with what it said?"

AverageSavage 2mo ago

Brillant! <- I had AI write that.

trueno 2mo ago
You've touched on something real here

ModernMech 2mo ago

This is a good move. I teach a summer async remote course that's ending next week, but I'm giving all the students incompletes until they come back to campus and take an in-person exam the first week of classes. All homework is worth a marginal amount, and if they fail the final they fail the class. I'm not going to spend my effort policing whether they're using AI or not in their class work because it's a losing battle. At the end of the day, they can either demonstrate mastery of the material at an exam or not. It makes the exams higher stakes, but that's where we are.

glimshe 2mo ago
I'd never pay to have you as a teacher, I'm sorry. Maybe your move makes a sense for the reputation of your university's degree, but as a student willing to pay to learn remotely, I'd not accept to be treated like children.
- williamcotton 2mo ago
  Are you after learning or an accredited degree?
- throw_m239339 2mo ago
  Well that's part of the issue with for profit education, if the student pays significant money for tuition, is he a customer or a student?
  - majormajor 2mo ago
    "The student is the customer" is a stupid metaphor that only caught on because a lot of people would rather just bring in dollars than worry about "are we actually teaching anything?"
    - hackyhacky 2mo ago
      It's not a metaphor. They are literally the customer.
      - otterley 2mo ago
        They're a customer in the same way that a martial arts student is a customer: getting your butt kicked is literally what you're paying for.
        hackyhacky 2mo ago
        Sure. And just like with a martial arts student, if you kick their butt too hard, you will lose the customer and might get sued.
        otterley 2mo ago
        Sued for giving out hard work assignments? That doesn't sound plausible. Under what theory would a student have a case?
        hackyhacky 2mo ago
        Teachers and school districts are often sued by irate parents when their little golden angel gets a bad grade. Schools are therefore incentivized to allow all students to pass, regardless of ability. https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/suing-over-bad-grades/ https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/suing-over-bad-gra... https://www.npr.org/2007/03/13/8278150/parent-sues-school-over-students-poor-grade https://www.npr.org/2007/03/13/8278150/parent-sues-school-ov...
- trentor 2mo ago
  You can learn remotely in his class. That's the whole point he is trying to make. Hybrid does not mean fully remote. If you want fully remote take a full remote class.
- pjmorris 2mo ago
  Do you think 'At the end of the day, they can either demonstrate mastery of the material at an exam or not' is a reasonable expectation for an adult? If so, how would an adult be treated while still expecting them to demonstrate mastery? If not, what do you think a reasonable expectation for an adult should be?
- pdhborges 2mo ago
  Are you willing to pay to learn remotely from a university with crappy reputation?
- cortesoft 2mo ago
  If you only care about the learning, then you could just take the incomplete. You don’t somehow lose the knowledge you gained. The only cost of an incomplete is it doesn’t help towards a degree, but a degree is just a signaling mechanism. If you want to be able to use their degree to signal something to someone, you will have to jump through their hoops.
- majormajor 2mo ago
  Adults don't have to prove things? As AI eats up the need for half-assed "I googled a few things and wrote something up and then slacked off for five hours" white-collar-paperwork jobs, it's gonna be pretty hard for people not willing or able to demonstrate that they can do anything that couldn't just be fully done with an "agent" instead.
- bonoboTP 2mo ago
  Regular graded assignments is the "treated like children" version. The adult treatment is that you can come to class if you want, you can do the assignments if you want, but if not, that's fine too. There is one test at the end, and it's your responsibility to prepare for it as you want. You manage your own time, we offer consultation, lectures, assignments, tutorials etc. but you can reject all of this and learn the material from some other textbook, and as long as you've mastered the material, you'll get a good grade at the exam. This is how German universities work, for the most part.
  - fluidcruft 2mo ago
    The problem is the vicious feedback nowadays of online student evaluations of professors. Professors that are rigorous get complaints and low rankings, kids don't sign up for their sections etc. Kids (parents) pay the administration and the administration wants to keep the customer happy. The only real answer are standardized exams (such as licensure exams) which are beyond parent pocketbook capture.
    - bonoboTP 2mo ago
      Or like Europe. You don't pay tuition, but if you slack off, and don't progress properly, you only have a limited number of exam retries and limited number of funded semesters. If you fail, you're out, choose another profession. You're not a customer, you're someone who is trying to prove themselves and get certified by experts on their knowledge. The "customer" of the university is whoever will glance at the degree paper and tries to ascertain the skill/knowledge level of the outgoing student. They have to give a good signal there. The reason this doesn't work in the US, is because they want mediocre children of rich parents to be pushed through, because college is a networking and social class-based finishing school, not a place for acquiring knowledge. (Also, there should be electives, but the rigorous backbone of a degree should be mandatory, so "students won't choose this course" doesn't come up.)
      - otterley 2mo ago
        > The reason this doesn't work in the US, is because they want mediocre children of rich parents to be pushed through, because college is a networking and social class-based finishing school, not a place for acquiring knowledge. Out of curiosity, which US university did you attend? I went to a well-known and highly-regarded public university in California, and they absolutely did not coddle their students. Poor-performing students regularly washed out.
- pbasista 2mo ago
  > I'd not accept to be treated like children. What is your expectation from such a class? What are you hoping to get out of it? If you merely want a tutor that will help you out navigate a topic you are interested in, with no strings attached, then sure, yes. No need to take exams. But if the goal is to get a formally recognized degree in some topic, then you will need to accept that there will be oversight over how you understand that topic. Because the institutions granting those degrees need to sign them off. And if they care about their reputation, they would be interested in signing off only on those students, who actually understand the topic. So there will need to be exams. In the AI era, it is close to impossible to guarantee that a remote exam will accurately evaluate your understanding of a topic. So the exams would need to be carried out in person. There is nothing children-specific in using such approach. It is merely one of the few still somewhat objective ways to actually test people's understanding of some topic.
Discordian93 2mo ago
I hope at least the homework is good prep for the exams, otherwise if its grade value is marginal there's little point from the PoV of a student that just needs to pass the class to take it seriously
- ModernMech 2mo ago
  Oh yes, the exam is basically: take your actual homework, augment it according to this spec. If they've built their homework themselves, they should be well prepared. If it's the first time they're looking at their own work, which has happened, they probably won't finish in time. It helps to be fluent in the codebase for a timed exam.

azalemeth 2mo ago

This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's very apparent to both student and teachers how well a topic is understood. Marks are rarely contested and in my experience most students think the process is fair. Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....

viccis 2mo ago
>Of course, woe betide those with social phobias I can see this being a problem in the US when it comes to "accommodations" in general. Students with an ADHD diagnosis can claim it causes just about any difficulty and get accommodations for it. The local (top ranked, but everyone's seen all the stories coming out of the Ivies...) college here gives students with ADHD double time on exams and has them take it in a special disabilities proctoring center where it's a struggle to get the staff there to even enforce those time limits. Obviously this also makes it infinitely easier to outright cheat as well. Not a chance you will get past the "my ADHD makes it hard for me to think about these things verbally" challenge at institutions like this.
- bonoboTP 2mo ago
  European universities also have accommodations and extra time etc. And yes it's an arms race. Though at some point it will simply inflate away the value of the degree, but educators will stand there baffled, not understanding how it could happen.
- eutropia 2mo ago
  as someone with ADHD who always finished exams first or was the designated spokesperson for group presentations... I have no idea why you'd want to be taking a test a second longer than you already have to. Either you know the material or you don't, anything taking a lot of time is borderline stuff where you're scrapping for points you might not deserve in the first place lol

behnamoh 2mo ago

Denmark is a very small country and what works there doesn’t necessarily work at the scale of the US or China.

toad_tyrrant 2mo ago
Why not? This is such a thought terminating statement. No actual reason.
- behnamoh 2mo ago
  Tell me you're not a programmer w/o telling me. What works at scale can be fundamentally different than what works in a small startup (Denmark).
  - halperter 2mo ago
    Could you point out a reason why education, which can be standardized at least to a state scale¹, cannot be standardized to the state scale utilizing oral defenses? Also, can be ≠ is. Not everything is a startup lol ¹https://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/ https://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/
  - toad_tyrrant 2mo ago
    You said it can be fundamentally different, and of course it can. But “it doesn’t scale” isn’t an argument by itself. In many areas, scale actually creates efficiencies. You’d need to explain what specifically about the larger scale makes the Danish approach unworkable in the U.S
  - flaunf221 2mo ago
    If in person exams are seemingly impossible in US due to scale, we have to conclude that before internet US had no education?
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throwatdem12311 2mo ago

My entire university education was evaluated mostly by proctored closed book exams and oral defenses. AI proof 10 years before AI.

millicentricism 2mo ago

Oral Defences have a long established tradition in Denmark, but recently there’s been real cut back on this as a money saving exercise. So both teachers and Students are familiar with this form of examination. So for a dane this reads like “back to the old way”, rather than anything new or novel.

amelius 2mo ago

A nice plot twist would be if those tests were administered by an AI.

deadbabe 2mo ago
At some point they will have to be won't they? Too many students. At scale, I imagine something similar to the Baseline Test in Bladerunner 2049.
jimbokun 2mo ago
More like a tired trope.

lacoolj 2mo ago

Why is everyone in this thread comparing this to a University But yeah, this is a good step. Homework is also becoming obsolete at this point. If they can't do it with pen and paper in class, there's no reliable way to evaluate work anymore.

trostaft 2mo ago
I'm teaching a university math course next semester and I've been messing around with a solution to this that my old analysis professor used to employ. Every week, they take home a handful of theory questions. These aren't turned in for credit. But, every week, there'll be a short quiz where one of those questions are asked verbatim, along with a small follow up. That felt like a very natural solution to me. Of course, worst case scenario, they just blindly generate and memorize the proofs without thinking. But I think the follow ups will catch them in that case. Moreover, I choose to believe that >90% of my students are willing to at least put in the work of scrutinizing those proofs which is honestly not bad exercise in its own right. I would love to do oral exams directly, the logistics with the number of students I have just make that hard. I know we're trialing it with the less populated special topics courses.
- rf_physics 2mo ago
  This follow up idea is a fun one! Not likely I'll have to be teaching a course like this again, but I will suggest it to some people I know.
jimbokun 2mo ago
Only as an honor system for students who want to learn the material. But worthless for assessments and assigning grades.

solenoid0937 2mo ago

This is a nightmare for students that don't think on their feet.

camphy 2mo ago
Yeah as much as I like the idea, I know there will be some brilliant and driven students who would have a hard time with this due to temperament. For me, if I’m excited about something, I can talk for hours. Maybe not so for everyone though. Then again, not all brilliant and driven students test well either, so… pick your poison?
otterley 2mo ago
Can you explain why? As I understand it, you're supposed to be able to talk about the work in which you already invested the mental energy to write. Writing involves much more "brain work" than speaking, so if you've truly written the work in question, you should be capable of speaking about it -- unless you have some sort of disability, in which case, there are probably alternative avenues.
BlackjackCF 2mo ago
This is definitely something you can't force onto students on a whim. This is a something that can be taught and worked up to though.
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silversmith 2mo ago
If you don't have enough of a mastery over a subject to rapidly respond, maybe you are not fit to pass exam certifying your mastery over a subject.
- solenoid0937 2mo ago
  I know world-leading experts in their field that avoid oral debates precisely because they don't think on their feet.

schroeding 2mo ago

I find it quite surprising that Danish high school students (the article isn't about university) apparently did write digital exams with internet access until now, so basically open book.

pdhborges 2mo ago
I'm also surprised. In Portugal primary, middle and high school tests and exams are all proctored and the vast majority of them written by hand.

camphy 2mo ago

I wish we were doing this in the US even before AI was an issue. I suspect it would reorient students to their work in some pretty cool ways. I mean, it might feel like torture for some and maybe that’s not so much a bad thing. I’m sure I’m not thinking of some downsides to this too, but it seems like such a great counter against “factory” schooling. Of course, this could be a lot more work for faculty and could be hard to keep up with a huge student population. Again, maybe a feature more than a bug.

PEe9bB7D 2mo ago

Oral exams were the norm when I studied. Even for technical topics.

subhobroto 2mo ago

The more I read about articles like these, I grow even more convinced that the education industry as a whole, regardless of the country or stature, has kind of lost their plot. Sometimes I even wonder if this is the outcome of sheer laziness, fear or both. When I speak to professors, teachers and students - It's also surprising that "top tier" institutions are fighting AI harder (outside extremely specific courses like Harvard’s flagship CS50, MBA courses at Wharton (UPenn) and MIT) while "bottom tier" institutions are completely embracing it and rebuilding their curriculum around it. One CS professor at a "bottom tier" CSU mentioned to me that he's actively going completely "open book using AI" - students are allowed to use anything they want from Claude to Codex to OpenCode to finish assignments but the assignments have now changed from "blurt out quicksort" to "let's sort N natural numbers in a cache efficient way using least amount of resources". I would hire the latter over the former anytime. I am tired of interviewing candidates who can shit out quicksort before I can even finish my sentence but stare at me dumbfounded when I ask them to sort people's name serialized in unicode. In my opinion, the bulk of traditional education has been a mix of memorization of facts, knowing inference rules, and applying inference rules to those facts, coupled with recall. Before the age of LLMs, only very expensive-to-build rule-based expert systems were able to replicate that functionality. Humans were just simply cheaper and way more reliable. In 2026, Frontier models are exceedingly, across the board, across industries, breaking records and challenging those notions on cost, capability and sophistication. Trying to replicate how education used to operate pre-frontier LLMs is like forcing people to farm by hand in the age of automated tractors that have LIDAR, Vision, RTK on board. I'm not discounting other elements of learning like collaborative debate, clinical/lab work, Socratic reasoning, emotional intelligence and the development of a professional network - but I argue these skills are not limited to a school or university setting. Infact, a lot of this is distorted in a school or university setting compared to the real world. I have been filing my own taxes, including complexities like equity, real estate and business income for over a decade now, so it's not just a simple 1040 and 540. Reading through IRS documentation, talking to EAs and CPAs to fill in ambiguities and gaps was pretty expensive in terms of time and money. Both Claude Opus and GPT 5.5 now, as of 2026, answer all my tax questions correctly. Those thousands of dollars in time and money I had spent has been replaced by a single $20 subscription. Unless tax codes drastically change every year, that $20 is a one time cost. If I were to begin my tax journey in 2026, I would never had to spend those dollars: dozens of tax professionals are out of a job - all their education is for nothing. It's entirely irrelevant whether they passed their exams by carving answers out on granite, taking their exams in a jail cell on an island proctored by Catholic Nuns under the watchful guard of automatic machine guns manned by T-1000s, I just don't need them anymore. For my usecase, these humans and their credentials provide 0 additional value over a one-time $20 expense, no matter how complicated it was for them to get their credential and what complex interpretive dance they had to do to impress the people awarding their grades. All this "reject AI, do it by hand" is just insanity at worst and laziness at best. That said, I'm personally unsure what the future of education in the age of tractors is like but removing weeds, planting seeds, watering them, all by hand is certainly not it. It's my understanding that most countries - developed or developing - are bottlenecked on educating their masses due to lack of qualified teachers. That's a bandwidth problem. Having those teachers listen to oral arguments from a handful of students is not solving the core bandwidth problem. All these shenanigans is doing a disservice to the public.

datahack 2mo ago

This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments. But what it does threaten to do is effectively abandon all the efficiencies of the written word. When higher education evolved into a mass system in the 1800s and into the 1900s, pure oral examination was looked at as super inefficient. A written paper could be handed in and graded without lining everyone up in front of a panel. The oral system scales poorly. One examiner can only hear so many students in a day. There are damn good reasons Medieval universities were small and modern ones are not. Requiring every major paper to be defended live reintroduces the bottleneck that written exams were designed to escape. Accessibility takes a hit too. Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective? This does not seem very logical, or sensitive. So while it’s nice that academics are rediscovering the old ways, I don’t really see this as a scalable answer to raising education levels for the masses, but more of a knee jerk way to try to bypass the obvious technological disruption by returning to non-scalable, inaccessible ways of doing things that our ancestors abandoned for a reason. It has its place for graduate students and smaller volume education systems. It’s fine for keeping the ivory tower clean. But it’s not the answer to expanding education to everyone and taking advantage of the technological disruption to advance education and learning throughout greater humanity, which is what AI definitely possesses as a possibility.

altairprime 2mo ago
It’s a good answer for keeping online education honest. It doesn’t need to be applied to all in-person schools, where teachers distribute spot checks across the course relatively evenly, but it makes perfect sense in conjunction with online testing. You only have to challenge one essay per student per term to catch cheaters with a near-perfect success rate. Assuming a 12 week course with 36 students, that’s qty.3-4 of teacher:student one on one meetings per week for the term; I think that’s doable. If you’ve oversold your teachers and have more than 36 students per, guess you’ll have to increase your labor expenses :D

snapetom 2mo ago

This is great. Sorry, but the Western World has to stop normalizing extreme introvertism. Humans are social. We rely on communication and cooperation to survive. Allowing kids to shelter themselves from interaction and communication during crucial development stages will only hamper them in life.

ryanhecht 2mo ago

This just feels like good educational practice too? I remember really enjoying TA'ing as an undergrad for courses I took the previous year, because THAT'S when I felt I _really_ learned the material. Likewise, when I was a lab consultant, I felt like advising others was when the concepts of Linux/systems administration _really_ sunk in. I always crammed the bare minimum for any kind of assessment (by the end of college I was actively avoiding any classes with final exams), but when I need to be able to teach someone else or explain my understanding in a live environment? That's when I _actually_ learn.

scoofy 2mo ago

I had to do an oral defense of my thesis in graduate school. When you've spent months and months writing something extremely obscure... well, I'd hope that it's not that difficult.

jimbokun 2mo ago
You suddenly realize the foremost expert on the research in your dissertation…is you.
- scoofy 2mo ago
  Yes! A fun anecdote from my defense was that this element of logic "did not exist before some time" or something. One of my citations was a book from like, the 1700's or something, and it absolutely blew away one of the committee members that I'd found it. He asked me "how on earth did you find this reference?" and I just told him that I look at all the math/logic libraries in Boston I had access to, I looked up all their logic books that predated the cut off I was looking for, and I skimmed them. I didn't even have to leave my university's library, because one of the first five books had the counter-factual I was looking for. Sure, it was a rare book and I had read it in a special room, but it wasn't particularly hard to find. Before that defense, I was 100% the only person alive with that information.

la64710 2mo ago

This is the way

akurilin 2mo ago

It feels like systems like the Maturita' final multi-day exam in Italy do a pretty good job at providing students with a standardized, state-supervised process for demonstrating one's competence by the end of high school. No computers, you're under the watchful eye of your teachers the whole time, nobody knows what's going to be on the exam until the day of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matura#Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matura#Italy It's time consuming and nerve-wracking, but it feels fair.

willmeyers 2mo ago

In my high school English class (like 10 years ago) my teacher assigned readings and called on a random person each day to give an overview of a section. He basically quizzed you in front of the class on themes, plots, etc. It was very effective at getting me to read and care for that class, because if you just sat up there and didn't know anything you'd lose marks on participation (and look kind of dumb). Not sure if/when/why oral presentations and public speaking are no longer got prioritized.

BrandoElFollito 2mo ago

This is and have always been the case for Masters and above across Europe. It varies for Licentiates. It is also often the case for exams in majors (they are often oral). So nothing innovative there

izacus 2mo ago
In my part of Europe oral exams have been a staple even in highschool and across unis. I was pretty surprised when I've seen that other parts of the world don't complement written testing with oral understanding checks.

jsrozner 2mo ago

As a thought experiment: In-person testing or oral defense approaches work until we get implants. If people have implants, what then? Demand that the implant be turned off? Demand that the implant's data connection be turned off? In the latter case, the person with more storage or a better local model wins. In the long run, in the AGI world, if everyone has implants, then everyone is roughly equal because computer-aided computation will be better than what any individual can do. Those without implants are screwed. (I don't want an implant; nor do I want others to have implants.)

para_parolu 2mo ago
Thos whole debate is happening because people think a degree matters. Because getting a piece of paper is more important than knowledge. Students will continue to cheat (AI or not) as long as the goal is to get a stamp.

sudo_cowsay 2mo ago

Couldn't students ask AI to make a oral defense plan?

oynqr 2mo ago
Did you know that there is a foolproof way to cheat on any exam? You can just store the answers in your brain. They won't even notice you cheated.
- sudo_cowsay 2mo ago
  Woah! Really! I never knew that!
- audreyfei 2mo ago
  maybe the policy will succeed in encouraging learning for most students (at least I hope so!!); otherwise some might still rely on ai because of the trust they've built up with it, a lack of connection to and therefore faith in the info they're expected to just memorize, low confidence in their abilities, etc
hx8 2mo ago
At this point you're just describing learning using buzz words.
ungovernableCat 2mo ago
Of course they could, in fact it'll probably be great prep if they read it and understand it instead of just memorising the answer. If they just memorise the answer any smart teacher can trip them up by just rephrasing things or developing tangents to see understanding. In school before exams, I'd often make little cheat sheets about things that you'd need to memorise like formulas for areas and volumes or certain physics equations (we weren't allowed any reference material for that on exams). The very act of writing them all down before the exam would often boost my memory enough to the point I'd just recall them.

thomashabets2 2mo ago

That's going to be a hard test. Have you ever heard Danish?

thoughtpeddler 2mo ago

As an educator myself, this quarter for the first time for my course's final project, I've switched to actually asking my students to provide an "AI Authenticity Audit" of their (project-relevant) chats in the construction of said projects. All my students' output over the last two years went from pre-AI level quality to boardroom-ready polish, and I'm actually more interested to see how they arrive at an outcome rather than the final output itself - focusing on their questioning, curating, editing, and iterating process. Didn't think we'd get to somewhere like this so soon, but here we are. Strange, but I'm trying it out.

tempestn 2mo ago
IMO this kind of thing adds work and stress for the best students. If I'd been faced with something like this while I was in school I would have felt the need to basically curate a parallel construction AI discussion, knowing it would be judged. I understand the theory that, in the age of AI, the prompts are more interesting than the outputs, but I'm not convinced this is the way. Things like the Denmark approach (and/or in-person written responses) seem like a better direction. Treat take-home writing the same as we've treated take-home math questions - as useful practice (for those who choose to actually engage with it), but not a significant input to grading.
- thoughtpeddler 2mo ago
  Yes, I thought about that, and which is why I'm just running this as a pilot for this quarter to see how it goes and I'm not particularly attached to it if feedback/results are mixed. But that said, there are real constraints on my ability to supervise students with in-person examination, but that is more a problem with how my society funds and cares about education. We are forced to take approaches that 'work at scale', hence experiments like this. But truly, reception was positive when this was introduced, because students too want to be held to a good standard and don't want others to get credit for not doing the work toward achieving the learning outcomes like the most honest ones.

Papazsazsa 2mo ago

Watching tech cannibalize itself is about as entertaining as watching Hollywood do it in the mid-2000s.

userbinator 2mo ago

It was already long-standing practice, when I was teaching many many years ago, to interview suspected cheaters (it's usually quite obvious) to see if they actually knew what they claimed they knew.

singingtoday 2mo ago
Only the dumb ones are obvious. In my school (SFU/BC) most of the students in almost all of my classes cheated. VERY FEW got caught. I heard instructors say all too often that it was obvious when somebody was cheating, but somehow they missed the guy paying his cousin to write the final.
- singingtoday 2mo ago
  I should add, this was for CS. I don't know about the other programs.
- userbinator 2mo ago
  Sometimes it's just an empty threat, and instructors don't want to deal with the rest of the fallout. Even more so these days with the infusion of identity politics in education.

ajsnigrutin 2mo ago

In slovenia, at least in most engineering colleges, every exam was a combination of written + oral, way before AI even existed.

Halan 2mo ago

I’ve studied CS in Italy and most if not all exams were both written and oral some also had labs. I thought it was the same for other degrees too.

dystopiandevel 2mo ago

This is a great strategy. It is something I do in code reviews as a senior developer. There has been observed longer code reviews for seniors and this kind of approach keeps it manageable.

leros 2mo ago

This is how we used to grade labs when I was a TA in college. Students worked in groups of two and showed up with a working project to get graded. Afterwards, we'd ask the two students questions and it was extremely obvious if one or both of them didn't work on it.

IFC_LLC 2mo ago

I mean, this is pretty much the easiest way of handling the problem. When I was teaching in a university the easiest thing to test someone's understanding was a simple question: "Explain me how would you use this in a day-to-day situation." If the guy knows his business, he'll go on a long lecture obsessing over every new feature of C# 2.0 or PHP 3. He would give you all the differences between Firefox 3.5.1 and IE 6 with Maxthon. (Goddamn I'm freaking old) Should you not find a spark of interest but just random mumbo-jumbo of words that don't constitute sentences, you can clearly see that there is no understanding present in the subject. In this case you work as a teacher, helping the guy to figure out what he does not understand in a subject and simplifying things for him till this clicks. After that he will be able to talk about said subject for hours with gusto.

biffles 2mo ago

One step closer to mentats.

audreyfei 2mo ago

The Conversation has an article that supports raising expectations for students, given that they have access to AI https://theconversation.com/mit-researchers-say-using-chatgpt-can-rot-your-brain-the-truth-is-a-little-more-complicated-259450 https://theconversation.com/mit-researchers-say-using-chatgp...

agumonkey 2mo ago

Millions of students are now donating to neuralink so they can have stealth LLM answers on the fly. Teachers will have to count the number of load bearing per paragraph.

paulorlando 2mo ago

Good to see. Related, I've moved to requiring regular in-class handwritten quizzes. Just a blank piece of paper to start, with the questions on the board. The practice forces students to recognize whether they are learning specific topics.

nrvn 2mo ago

In my uni years bachelors, masters and PhDs required thorough research resulting in a huge opus printed and stitched together but the only thing that really mattered was the presentation of the work in front of the committee and oral defenses. To this day I have been living in full confidence that this is the academic standard that has been in place and effective (with variations) over centuries, if not millenias… Even intermediate exams were a combinations of practical work in some written form and the theoretical grill sessions in the end of every semester. All in all, if I had to put a professor’s hat today I would not give a sh.. if my students would use LLMs to write text. What would matter (and what does for me as a hiring manager at $WORK) and a human being with decency is the results of the _natural neural network_ training so to speak. IF whatever prompts and interactions with LLMs result in sharp knowledge of the subject and ability to apply the knowledge to solving real problems, well done and congrats!

Daviey 2mo ago

I'm quite impressed with the Hungarian system, for 18-19 year old school leavers, where every subject is split 50/50 between: - Írásbeli (written) - standardised written exam, centrally set and marked - Szóbeli (oral) - the panel interview The oral (szóbeli) has: - A committee of 2-3 teachers sits as a panel - The student draws a topic at random from a list - They get prep time (usually 15-20 mins) - They present their answer to the panel - The panel asks follow-up questions and probes understanding

aborsy 2mo ago

The problem with oral exam is that it’s done serially student by student, which can be infeasible with large classes. The grading is also highly subjective. Written exams are also not best suited to project-based classes. What’s the best way to grade students in classes with coding projects?

whyenot 2mo ago
Its serial nature also means that an evaluator's standards can drift from students with early exams to those with later exams. Oral exams can introduce issues of sex and ethnic biasing.
- p-e-w 2mo ago
  Or just regular personal biasing, which is just as unfair but doesn’t receive government protection even in theory.
- xboxnolifes 2mo ago
  Evaluation drift happens with written exams too. They are graded serially.
pelagicAustral 2mo ago
Arguably, the problem with higher education is one of volume.

jojobas 2mo ago

Somehow Russian technical universities were never relying on written work, there is some, but even that is is delivered in person with the tute teacher asking this and that. Tangentially, the market for uni assignments (mostly humanities) for pay was huge before AI.

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jimnotgym 2mo ago

Side note/ anecdote. When I was in school there was a maths aural test. The teacher read out questions and you wrote the answers, with no calculator. Basically a stupid name for a mental arithmetic test. The funny thing was the teachers were so at pains to differentiate between two words that sound basically the same in our local accent, aural and oral, that they insisted on pronouncing aural as "ow-eral' the ow being pronounced like a pain reaction sound. The smarter kids took to teasing the teacher with words like aura and aurora, and asking how to pronounce them...

Ylpertnodi 2mo ago
Oral and 'ow-erall' are both used where I am.

dyauspitr 2mo ago

From my conversation with some undergraduates, 99% of people are using LLMs for any applicable assignment.

golem14 2mo ago

Fun story: Final oral exam (in history, I believe -- a thing back then), I took a whole A4 paper and turned it into hundreds of little balls in front of 3 teachers over the duration of the oral exam. I had no idea I was doing this until one of the teacher pointed to the heap in front of me, but it saved my bacon as I did otherwise well.

azhenley 2mo ago

I wrote about assessing students in the era of AI from when I was teaching at Carnegie Mellon: https://austinhenley.com/blog/aihomework.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/aihomework.html

Ozzie-D 2mo ago

[flagged]

molybd3num 2mo ago

in the french CPGEs they have you make a mini research project to be presented in front of 2/3 judges at the end of the 2 years, each year has it's own theme (this year it's efficiency/optimisation) thankfully it doesn't need to be very deep, but it has to tie somewhat into the curriculum which can be annoying

fennecbutt 2mo ago

Good! Prevents AI being used to one shot the writing and helps them practice public speaking as well (even for people like me who hate public speaking).

humam_alhusaini 2mo ago

Seems inefficient, why not just distribute a version history with the document?