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.
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.