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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
no i'm saying there should be a basic level of fluency in the material beyond regurgitation. saying every course should have people able to write a paper on some assigned part of it, or to prepare a presentation, or to take an oral exam with a previous idea of what the material will be is reasonable and essential.
i think you're making this out to be way harder than it actually is, before almost any exam i can discuss pretty well the material behind it. half the time i end up explaining something to a friend who is wondering about something. it's really not that hard.
the only thing that would make it hard is if somebody was bad at speaking and communicating effectively. but just like being unable to write well will hurt your grade in a non-writing course, being unable to speak well should significantly reduce your grade or make you unable to pass.
> no i'm saying there should be a basic level of fluency in the material beyond regurgitation. saying every course should have people able to write a paper on some assigned part of it, or to prepare a presentation, or to take an oral exam with a previous idea of what the material will be is reasonable and essential.
Writing a paper, presenting or taking an oral exam mostly require regurgitation.
> i think you're making this out to be way harder than it actually is, before almost any exam i can discuss pretty well the material behind it. half the time i end up explaining something to a friend who is wondering about something. it's really not that hard.
Explaining something to a friend isn't the same as the teacher selecting a random aspect of the course, and asking you to explain it with a certain depth. Either they can only ask things that are too basic, or they ask complex things in which structuring the content is very hard. Not to mention that asking to explain it is fairly different from knowing how to use it.
To put one of my oral exams as an example, it was on harmonic analysis. Instead of the full course, the teacher had to limit which theorems could be asked in the exam, because covering everything on the course well enough for an oral exam was an impossible task (not just for students, I bet the teacher wouldn't be able to recall every theorem and every condition). My question was explaining a certain covering lemma. Fairly easy and basic. Second part was proving it, and I didn't know that proofs were going to be part of the exam so I hadn't the proof memorized. I started proving it myself, but of course the limited time of an oral exam was not at all enough so the teacher told me to stop.
IMHO, being able to prove the theorem shows deeper knowledge than memorizing the proof. But oral exams aren't a good place for doing that. In fact, most "good exams" I've taken where written exams where you could even bring your own notes, and had different exercises (do all of the basic ones, choose one of the difficult ones) to prove not that you had memorized the material, but that you actually understood it.
taking an oral exam is different from being able to discuss something. you know as well as i do there's a difference between a regurgitation paper and one that requires you apply knowledge to analyze something else.
the kind of questions i'm talking about are application. like for a programming course you might ask what features of a particular language one might explore for solving some vague problem and why. for history pick some current event and ask about its parallels to and lessons for something happening today.
harmonic analysis is probably one of the worse use cases for this. and yeah i agree with open notes exams.
