When students in Catherine Hartmann’s honors seminar at the University of Wyoming took their final exams this month, they encountered a testing method as old as the ancient philosophers whose ideas they were studying.
For 30 minutes, each student sat opposite Hartmann in her office. Hartmann asked probing questions. The student answered.
Hartmann, a religious studies professor who started using oral examinations last year, is not alone in turning to a decidedly old-fashioned way to grade student performance.
Across the country, a small but growing number of educators are experimenting with oral exams to circumvent the temptations presented by powerful artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT.
Such tools can be used to cheat on take-home exams or essays and to complete all manner of assignments, part of a broader phenomenon known as “cognitive off-loading.”
Hartmann tells her students that using AI is like bringing a forklift to the gym when your goal is to build muscle. “The classroom is a gymnasium, and I am your personal trainer,” she explains. “I want you to lift the weights.”
So far, her students have embraced the training regimen. Lily Leman, 20, a double major in Spanish and history, took her final exam last week. Leman admits to being “pretty freaked out” at first by the idea of an oral exam. Now she wishes she had more of them. “With this exam, I don’t know how you would use AI, frankly,” Leman said.
Ever since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, educators have been grappling with the challenge AI represents for existing methods of learning. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.)
In a recent survey of college students by Inside Higher Ed, 85 percent said they had used AI in their courses, including to brainstorm ideas and prepare for quizzes. A quarter admitted they had used it to complete assignments. And about 30 percent said colleges should design more AI-proof methods of assessment, including oral exams.
To combat AI-driven cheating, some professors have turned to software to detect nonhuman work, although such tools struggle to produce reliable results. Others have embraced in-class, handwritten exams, spurring a resurgence in the use of “blue books,” the paper booklets that dominated college testing at the end of the last millennium.
Oral exams are an even older tool, documented in ancient institutions of learning in Rome, Greece, India and beyond. Until the 18th century, they remained the default mode of assessment at Oxford and Cambridge universities, according to Stephen Dobson, a professor and university administrator in Norway who wrote a book about oral exams.
In some countries, such as Norway and Denmark, oral exams never went away. In other places, they were preserved in specific contexts: for instance, in doctoral qualifying exams in the United States. Dobson said he never imagined that oral exams would be “dusted off and gain a second life.”
New interest in the age-old technique began emerging during the pandemic amid worries over potential cheating in online environments. Now the advent of AI models — and even AI-powered glasses — has prompted a fresh wave of attention.
Oral assessments are “definitely experiencing a renaissance,” said Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California at San Diego. Such tests are not always the answer, she added, but offer the added benefit of practicing a skill valuable for most careers.
Every department “should require their students at one point — probably at more than one point — to demonstrate their knowledge orally,” Bertram Gallant said.
The increasing interest in oral exams transcends disciplines and class sizes. Although some educators say the technique is better suited to smaller courses, professors at Canada’s University of Western Ontario have conducted oral exams for an undergraduate business class of 600. At the University of California at San Diego, oral exams were introduced in six large engineering courses, with positive impacts on student motivation.
Mark Chin, a professor of education policy at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, held his first-ever set of oral exams this month in his introduction to data science class.
Chin had prohibited the use of AI in the class. But he also knew how good it was at completing the type of coding work he was assigning. Oral exams were a way to test whether students were really learning the course material.
During the exam, Chin shows students examples of code written in R, the programming language they’ve been learning all semester, and asks them what it does.
So far, he has conducted 11 out of 26 final exams. Although students come in a bit anxious, Chin said, they’ve gone on to answer questions that would have flummoxed them back in September.
“You’ve learned this new, concrete, hard skill,” Chin said. “That’s the point of the oral exam.” Another bonus: the chance to sit with students in person and wrap up the semester. “It’s been really cool,” Chin said.
Jodi Hallsten Lyczak is a professor at Illinois State University’s School of Communication. She began using oral midterm and final exams earlier this year and intends to continue doing it for all her senior-level classes. “For me, it was 100 percent a way to avoid AI,” Hallsten Lyczak said. “This is the way of the future.”
Carley King, 20, a senior in Hallsten Lyczak’s course on theories of small-group communication, said she used ChatGPT to create practice questions for the oral exam. Then King hopped on a FaceTime call with her grandmother and asked her to run through the questions and pose follow-ups to prepare for the test.
The midterm and final exams in the class flew by, King said. “I would literally take an oral exam any day over a regular pen and paper exam,” she said. “You’re there all by yourself, face-to-face with your professor, using your knowledge.” (King got an A.)
This month, for the first time, Hallsten Lyczak encountered a student attempting to cheat on an oral exam conducted via Zoom. Hallsten Lyczak strongly suspected the student was entering the questions into an AI prompt on a computer during the video call.
“Oh, honey, I see your face illuminated by your screen,” Hallsten Lyczak thought. The AI tool also couldn’t properly answer the professor’s queries, which asked students to synthesize course concepts and materials. The student failed the exam.
For Hartmann at the University of Wyoming, the low point came in 2023 during a class she taught on the history of meditation. Students were assigned to write a personal reflection after trying the contemplative practice of their choice. One used AI to complete the task (it was “blatantly obvious,” Hartmann said: The student left in the prompt).
In an AI-saturated age, Hartmann began to feel as though take-home writing assignments were setting up her students for tough decisions, especially if their classmates were using AI to complete classwork. Plus, it put her in the position of rooting out AI-produced content. Hartmann felt like a detective instead of an educator. “I didn’t like that adversarial relationship,” she said.
Hartmann has revamped three courses to culminate in a final oral exam. She doesn’t allow devices in class and makes students practice answering discussion questions throughout the semester. Ahead of the final, she gives students a list of concepts they will be expected to explain and 20 questions they should be capable of answering with supporting evidence.
Sean Walker, a 21-year-old history and religious studies major from Bighorn, Wyoming, has completed two oral final exams in Hartmann’s courses. He’s a fan, not only of the technique but of everything that scaffolds it.
The courses offered a respite from the pressures AI can create, he said. “It can be a difficult ask for students when there are these incredible AI resources that can do a lot of this work much quicker just at your fingertips, even though it might really harm the learning you’ll do,” Walker said. “When there’s a class that just circumvents the whole thing, I felt I learned a lot more.”
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