Why Universities Should Return To Oral Exams In the AI and ChatGPT Era (theconversation.com) 99
In an op-ed via The Conversation, Stephen Dobson, professor and Dean of Education and the Arts at CQUniversity, Australia, argues that it is time for universities to return to oral exams in the AI and ChatGPT era. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: Imagine the following scenario. You are a student and enter a room or Zoom meeting. A panel of examiners who have read your essay or viewed your performance, are waiting inside. You answer a series of questions as they probe your knowledge and skills. You leave. The examiners then consider the preliminary pre-oral exam grade and if an adjustment up or down is required. You are called back to receive your final grade.
This type of oral assessment -- or viva voce as it was known in Latin -- is a tried and tested form of educational assessment. No need to sit in an exam hall, no fear of plagiarism accusations or concerns with students submitting essays generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Integrity is 100% assured, in a fair, reliable and authentic manner that can also be easily used to assess multiple individual or group assignments. As services like ChatGPT continue to grow in terms of both its capabilities and usage -- including in education and academia -- is it high time for universities to revert to the time-tested oral exam? "Chatbots cannot replicate this sort of task, ensuring student authenticity," writes Dobson. "I argue that it is time to change our conversation to be more about assessment that actually involves a 'conversation.'"
"Writing would still be important, but we should learn to re-appreciate the importance of how a student can talk about the knowledge and skills they acquired. Successfully completing a viva could become one of our graduate attributes, as it once was."
This type of oral assessment -- or viva voce as it was known in Latin -- is a tried and tested form of educational assessment. No need to sit in an exam hall, no fear of plagiarism accusations or concerns with students submitting essays generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Integrity is 100% assured, in a fair, reliable and authentic manner that can also be easily used to assess multiple individual or group assignments. As services like ChatGPT continue to grow in terms of both its capabilities and usage -- including in education and academia -- is it high time for universities to revert to the time-tested oral exam? "Chatbots cannot replicate this sort of task, ensuring student authenticity," writes Dobson. "I argue that it is time to change our conversation to be more about assessment that actually involves a 'conversation.'"
"Writing would still be important, but we should learn to re-appreciate the importance of how a student can talk about the knowledge and skills they acquired. Successfully completing a viva could become one of our graduate attributes, as it once was."
I foresee legal difficulties (Score:2)
Oral exams are well known to be particularly stressful, and are close enough to public speaking to trigger anxiety in some people.
I predict the first ADA lawsuit will be filed within days of this being implemented.
I can't imagine the suit prevailing (Score:3, Insightful)
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You should not give advice on the ADA. You know nothing about it. Less than nothing. What you believe you know is incorrect.
Deeper issue: From Degrading to De-Grading (Score:5, Interesting)
by Alfie Kohn: https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti... [alfiekohn.org]
Researchers have found three consistent effects of using - and especially, emphasizing the importance of - letter or number grades:
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself. ...
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks. ...
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking. ...
More Reasons to Just Say No to Grades
The preceding three results should be enough to cause any conscientious educator to rethink the practice of giving students grades. But as they say on late-night TV commercials, Wait - there's more.
4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective. ...
5. Grades distort the curriculum. ...
6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning. ...
7. Grades encourage cheating. ...
8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships with students. ...
9. Grades spoil students' relationships with each other. ...
[Detailed explanations of each point omitted. In short, specific well-intended written or verbal qualitative *feedback* to students is useful, whereas numerical grades given to students are often harmful.]
[Perhaps as my sig on the irony of tools of abundance being used by those still thinking in terms of scarcity, maybe that includes misguided educational institutions as well as AI?]
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Grades aren't for students, they are for potential employers. They are a quick way for the employers to sort graduates into tiers of ability and for graduates to provide an initial proof of their competence in the relevant field to the potential employers. If you don't have grades (or percentages or levels or whatever) you need something else that can do that sorting.
And yes, grades really suck in a number of different ways. But what would you have instead? You could use the feedback from professors, so now
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Equity and legacy are the answer (Score:2)
How should top colleges decide which high school students they should enroll?
Obviously equity. What identity based group has not hit its quota?
Unless there are legacies whose (grand)parents have sufficient wealth to make donations beyond the normal tuitions and fees. Not "name on a building" scale donations, but at least one of their regular tax deductible donations on the scale of 4-figures or greater.
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Would you apply the same principles in the NBA?
Why wouldn't the NBA support equitable hiring, they see quite progressive politically?
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You're not answering the question though. You suggest quota-based hiring in the universities (unless I misunderstood). Do you suggest quota based hiring in the NBA as well?
Why not? Why would equity in one organization be different than equity in another organization?
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Is that a "Yes, we should enforce racial quotas in the NBA"? Yes/No
Did "Why would equity in one organization be different than equity in another organization?" confuse you? Why would a progressive organization such as the NBA want to be immune from equity based practices?
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I am fully aware you have no obligation to answer my question. You can very well reply to my question with another question. And that's ok. A good day to you sir.
And you are free to dodge the reality that I had already answered your question. I referred to all organizations, that answers you NBA question. All organizations would include the NBA.
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Ideally yes, but depending on a role, state of economy at that point etc you could have a thousand graduates apply for a role, they aren't going to be able to interview them all. Although I suppose employers could use written tests instead or something like that. But yeah, after your first job it's not normally going to be relevant anymore.
Non-trivial personal projects useful (Score:2)
I can't remember the last time I saw or provided grades on a resume... I think it was my first application out of college where I put my GPA on there and never since.
That is about it, and even then they often don't matter. Work part time? Have a non-trivial personal project in your field? Something voluntary that goes beyond coursework, something you got no university credit for, something that was just because you were curious? These separate you from the pack of recent grads with nothing to show other than a GPA. I've had discussions with Fortune 100 recruiters where they said they wave GPA requirements in such cases.
You're probably right in that there isn't a much better way that isn't just the gut feeling of a teacher or manager at present.
Those personal projects driven by nothing beyond cu
Exposure therapy (Score:4, Informative)
Oral exams are well known to be particularly stressful, and are close enough to public speaking to trigger anxiety in some people.
I predict the first ADA lawsuit will be filed within days of this being implemented.
And this can be fixed with training.
Exposure therapy for fear is a well tested technique in psychoanalysis, and it works so long as the patient is the one who is in control of the exposure. For an example "fear of heights" you take the patient to a mall and ask them to go up the stairs to the 2nd level, or if they can't manage that up *to* the stairs. Next session you ask them to go up 1 step and more if they can manage it, and so on. Eventually they get to the 2nd level and can look over the balcony. Then you have them go up to the elevator doors, then into the elevator (while you hold the doors open so it can't leave), then inside with the doors shut, then up 1 level, and so on and so on.
This also works when you don't have a psychotherapist handy: so long as it is *you* who is in control of the exposure, and so long as you push yourself a little bit outside of your comfort zone each time, and so long as you have one or more nights of sleep between trials, you can cure yourself of fear.
Having gone through Toastmasters, I can attest to the effectiveness of conquering your fear of public speaking by simply doing it in a controlled friendly environment. In fact, Toastmasters *itself* is a testament to the fact that this fear can be conquered.
So as the OP was proposing that universities change, they can also change by giving students exposure therapy - by which I mean courses in public speaking - to desensitize them to public speaking before the stressful final exams.
And of course, the ability to be comfortable in front of public scrutiny would itself be a talent worthy of learning and be of help to the student in their subsequent careers.
And of course good examiners will take any shown nervousness into account and grade the student on their knowledge and not their presentation quality.
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While you can do some things with exposure training, it has its limits. It can't simulate the "the stakes are high" situation.
I have a fear of heights, but it's limited to unprotected situations. While I have successfully navigated overhanging walls with 150m drops below me and 20-30cm wide ridges with a drop of 500m on each side, I do these things with a rope and a climbing buddy (that doesn't make it entirely safe, but a fall just means you'll probably get hurt, but (usually) not killed).
However, every ti
Always 3 points of contact. (Score:2)
it's super scary, because I know a single mistake (or a piece of rock getting lose below my feet) will definitely kill me.
but it wont.
millions of people climb things in "unprotected" ways and do not die, a single loose rock sliding is not going to kill you in 98% of situations. your fear is just a lack of experience, which exposure therapy could help.
Best walk people through the math. Always maintain 3 point of contact, only one arm/leg can move at a time. One dislodged rock leaves you with 2 points of contact and that is usually enough.
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You have no idea what the hikes around here are.
This is just 5miles from my house and it's on my todo list:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
This is a comparatively easy hike I've done multiple times, however, still, care needs to be taken:
https://youtu.be/lWGRR1a5TC8?t... [youtu.be]
Done this last year:
https://youtu.be/1SnkMSivwuk?t... [youtu.be]
This is all very easy for me from a technical point of view (I can climb 5.9 - 5.10), but definitely not mentally. And no amount of exposure so far has changed that much.
Re:I foresee legal difficulties (Score:5, Insightful)
Oral exams are well known to be particularly stressful, and are close enough to public speaking to trigger anxiety in some people.
I predict the first ADA lawsuit will be filed within days of this being implemented.
And there it is. I was going to post, "Let the whining begin!" about people bringing up this point, but you beat me to it.
The reality is there are very few people who would be affected by this. Only a small sliver of society has true anxiety about public speaking. The rest are just whiners who like to claim they're stressed.
As Richard Feynman remarked, "If you couldn’t explain something fairly simply, you haven’t really understood it." This is no different. If you can't answer the questions, you don't deserve to pass.
Re:I foresee legal difficulties (Score:4, Informative)
And I'll add this:
I was standing at a podium in front of the classroom about to throw up and faint while giving a prepared speech for the first time in my life. As required, I looked at the video and I was a fucking mess.
Short-term assignments did little to ease the anxiety. Then one afternoon I was discussing physics, a subject I am very comfortable with, and I looked each individual in the eye and explained it to each one personally. It was a spectacular presentation.
I discussed this with the professor and she said that I had learned a valuable lesson: Never lecture on a subject that I don't know bullshit from wild honey.
Soon, we were allowed to pick our own subjects and it was enjoyable.
The Point
Know the goddam material for an oral exam and fly with it.
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Your experience has nothing to do with a medically diagnosed anxiety disorder that requires an ADA accommodation.
People like you are - literally - the reason the ADA exists.
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Absolutely no idea why the above post was modded 'Troll' as it is absolutely correct.
There are a bunch of people here posting 'Based on my personal dataset of a single sample, this won't be a problem for anyone'. They are incorrect. For a start it's a pre-filtered dataset as they wouldn't be posting their personal experience with doing OK on this kind of test if they hadn't already done OK on this kind of test.
It's a possible solution to the problem, but the people saying that it has to be implemented with
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Absolutely no idea why the above post was modded 'Troll' as it is absolutely correct.
It is erroneous on its face by anyone modestly familiar with the ADA. It should say "requires an ADA reasonable accommodation" The word "reasonable" is critical. Its absence distorts things.
You left out the word "reasonable" (Score:2)
Your experience has nothing to do with a medically diagnosed anxiety disorder that requires an ADA accommodation.
People like you are - literally - the reason the ADA exists.
You left out the word "reasonable". The ADA states: "The ADA requires reasonable accommodations as they relate to three aspects of employment: 1) ensuring equal opportunity in the application process; 2) enabling a qualified individual with a disability to perform the essential functions of a job; and 3) making it possible for an employee with a disability to enjoy equal benefits and privileges of employment."
Note "essential functions" of a job are not eliminated, they are accommodated if reasonably poss
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For people who actually have a diagnosed anxiety disorder beyond "I have ADHD and get stressed and have low self esteem" we can make exceptions.
We build stairs, but have ramps. We have speakers in movies, but have closed captioning. We can have oral exams, but have other methods for validating knowledge.
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The reality is there are very few people who would be affected by this.
That's why protected minorities are protected by the law. Because they're minorities who get discriminated against because they're minorities.
It only takes one to really mess up the financial statements, not to mention the bad PR.
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So, Stephen Hawking shouldn't have been able to get a Physics degree once he couldn't speak?
Modest accommodations allow oral exams (Score:2)
So, Stephen Hawking shouldn't have been able to get a Physics degree once he couldn't speak?
A thesis defense is usually in real time, but it does not have to be. He prepares a presentation, plays it, reviewers give him questions. Normally the answers are in real time but in the Hawkins case he would be able to prepare another presentation and play it. Repeat until all questions answered.
How is this different from various documentary appearances and interviews?
Re:I foresee legal difficulties (Score:5, Insightful)
So the shy person gets marked down because the stress shuts his/her brain off, while the glib bullshit artist gets the top grade.
Then there is also the time requirement. A two hour exam because it's all calculations on the board times the number of students in the class.
What classes did I have that used essays? Philosophy and the writing classes. Music history, but Shazam would be more useful than a chatbot.
Calculus? Fluid dynamics? Statics? Physical Metallurgy? Maybe on that one to explain the decomposition of austenite during heat treatment. Transport? Nah, all calculus, same with Kinetics. (Accept Octave Levenspiel as your personal messiah, it's easier that way.)
Over in chemistry you will be diagramming electrophilic and nucleophilic reactions, again blackboard work. P. chem is calculus again. Qualitative analysis is figure out the mystery goo. Quantitative analysis is titrate this properly. No essays in any of those.
The proposal must be for some other major. :-).
Presentation/defense a necessary leadership skill (Score:2)
So the shy person gets marked down because the stress shuts his/her brain off, while the glib bullshit artist gets the top grade.
There are classes for that. A friend was literally as you describe and three years later she was an awesome public speaker. It's a learned skill, one that takes effort for most people to learn. Some less effort, some more effort. That glib BS artist had probably started practicing and training in elementary school. My "timid" friend caught up.
The proposal must be for some other major. :-)
I recall thesis defense's to be interactive presentations, even in STEM.
Also, advanced degrees suggest the holder will be in a leadership position. So speaking to a
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Memorizing facts is not learning. Understanding them is. No teacher, or no technology, can ever make you understand something. Learning is essentially active, an individual appropriation of the material.
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Oral exams are well known to be particularly stressful, and are close enough to public speaking to trigger anxiety in some people.
I predict the first ADA lawsuit will be filed within days of this being implemented.
Unlike most commenters here, I have extensive experience in oral exams - I've been holding oral exams since 2008. Never had a grade challenge. Never even had anyone anyone change my set up due to accommodations.
And now with ChatGTPx, I discuss each essay with each student as I return them.
I know it sounds like a huge time commitment, but if you're efficient, you can do this, and still publish.
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good
might stop people being fucking pussies
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Beyond that, I see major logistics difficulties. Assuming this proposal is meant for classes at all levels, it seems like it would be very difficult to implement for lower level classes where you can have several hundred students across the various sections. For illustration, assuming a class had 500 students, and each student had 5 minutes for questions/responses, and with no gaps between students, it would take roughly 40 hrs to examine the whole class. And that doesn't include any time to prep or prepar
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If you can't express yourself to your colleagues, you are almost useless for working in a team, so I think that it is actually perfectly valid to have this as a means of assesment - but there should be more public speaking events or assignments throughout your education, or perhaps a course on verbal communication so you have a chance to learn how to deal with these situations.
Sooner or later in whatever career you are in, you nearly always have to be able to speak to a group without having a melt down - wh
So if you get nervous public speaking⦠(Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So if you get nervous public speakingâ (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone is so introverted they can't have a one-on-one conversation they need therapy. Even the people who might have some anxiety would benefit from the process because they'll probably get through the process (most professors aren't assholes and many are going to be introverts themselves) and having gone through the process will be a little bit less anxious about it the next time.
I know this because when I was young I didn't like public speaking at all. Even I thought it was weird because I had no problems being in high school plays, which I actually enjoyed. Speaking though would almost make me physically ill. But I had to take it in college and had to do it as a part of other college courses as well as at other points in my life. I can't say that I enjoy it and sometimes it's still a bit unnerving, but I've done it enough now to realize that it's not going to hurt me and that the physical dread I would feel was just something in my head that's not real or worth worrying about.
People with a fear of public speaking probably won't feel any anxiety from talking to a person one-on-one. Any anxiety would be from the usual test jitters and there are some advantages to an oral exam as it's much more like a conversation and unless you or the examiner are pretty far along the autism spectrum, you can read body language to determine how close your answer is and try to pivot if you're wrong.
Re: So if you get nervous public speakingâ&am (Score:3)
A teacher has 400 students and thus needs 400 classroom hours for each test.
400/8 is 50 days of continuous testing for the teacher
Testing is about student knowledge and ability some tests should be oral, but most do not
Oral examines stopped because they take to long to complete.
Each kid gets 5 minutes well now you are cramimg 20 kids an hour is a mere 20 hours or 3 days of testing on the teacher.
Or they can give 30 kids at a time 100 question test and have the whole lot done and graded in a day.
Re: So if you get nervous public speakingâ&am (Score:1)
A teacher has 400 students ...
That is quite atypical. And the per exam interviews could be handled by the class TA's too. Such anomalies tend to have multiple TA's. They also tend to be rudimentary general ed sort of classes so the oral exam concept is probably not really necessary there.
Re: So if you get nervous public speakingâ&am (Score:1)
A teacher has 400 students and thus needs 400 classroom hours for each test.
400/8 is 50 days of continuous testing for the teacher
No problem - just train a ChatGPT bot to conduct the oral exams
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It won't help them for very long. ChatGPT's output is surprisingly easy to spot. I don't know how best to describe it but it feels ... generic. Like someone awkwardly filling out a template. A lot of things read like a high-school student wrote them, and not just in the overall structure. That's to say nothing of the weird factual mistakes it has a habit of putting in.
Will it get better? Maybe, but it won't matter. Remember when you first saw CG stuff in movies and how amazing it looked? You couldn'
lol (Score:4, Funny)
With a different use of AI I'm pretty sure you could change one face or person into another. Yep, my hired expert looks and sounds just like me on the Zoom video.
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With a different use of AI I'm pretty sure you could change one face or person into another. Yep, my hired expert looks and sounds just like me on the Zoom video.
Good luck doing that in an offline in-person exam.
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I see a couple of problems.... (Score:2)
> Integrity is 100% assured, in a fair, reliable and authentic manner
These are people we are talking about here, right? The examiners I mean.
And, how long before AI gets good enough to fool someone over zoom?
Re:I see a couple of problems.... (Score:4, Interesting)
"And, how long before AI gets good enough to fool someone over zoom?"
At which point you have to go in person. We're a ways out yet from 3d printing a robot that will fool anyone into thinking its you in person.
And when that day comes, we'll that's a problem for them, they'll have technology far beyond us at that point so this might be the least of their concerns, or mooted entirely.
Re: I see a couple of problems.... (Score:2)
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Manual labor jobs are the first to be automated. We've been doing that for 100+ years.
Re: I see a couple of problems.... (Score:2)
Re: I see a couple of problems.... (Score:2)
Jobs like plumbing won't be any safer once tens of millions of people pour into those jobs after automation significantly disrupts office jobs.
As for your my guess for your question, the relatively fewer accounting jobs left will start to pay even more, and jobs like plumbing will have their pay drop significantly. I would still recommend someone put in the effort to be an above average accountant instead of joining a trade. That said, I think more people should join trades instead of joining white collar f
Exams in a room with pen and paper (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why? This sounds like a waste of time. High School GPA is five times more predictive of success in college than SAT scores, and essays aren't predictive at all. I really don't see the point of any of this.
Issues (Score:1)
>"Integrity is 100% assured, in a fair, reliable and authentic manner "
And yet you have to deal with students who are shy, have speaking problems, have language issues, get too stressed out being questioned, etc. And you have graders who can see the sex, age, and race of who is being examined (with written exams, all that COULD be withheld). It is also much slower, more labor/expense, less quantifiable, and less objective.
I am not saying verbal exams are bad (they should have some place, especially sin
Re: Issues (Score:2)
This. Especially the sex/race/age/looks bias. There absolutely is one. Hell just how your voice sounds. On top of that people "blank" during stressful events like this and fail to emit information they do know, others are good at bullshitting and can manipulate their grade higher.
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On top of that people "blank" during stressful events like this and fail to emit information they do know
Happened to me in a public setting. I was on a game show, and had a question about the 1936 Summer Olympics. Everybody in the world knows that there is exactly one correct answer to any question about those games (Jesse Owens). I blanked on it.
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rectal exams.
That's how the aliens find enough talent to do faster than light travel.
Finally I understand the saying "jump to light speed"
Written Tests (Score:5, Insightful)
In a classroom with no computer access and someone watching.
Class dismissed.
Will work for a while, I guess (Score:2)
until someone walks in with a Neuralink implant
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https://www.vice.com/en/articl... [vice.com]
Cavity searches?
$$ vs Integrity (Score:3)
Never happen.. How are they going to cram 300 students into one room, with one barely qualified teacher they pay just above subsistence wages if that one teacher ALSO has to sit through oral exams?
The universities would rather sacrifice integrity than money.
Or just in person on paper exams (Score:1)
Vivas for undergrads better than written exams? (Score:3, Interesting)
Vivas are absolutlely sucesceptible to bias. Viva examiners are human. But they're not trying to catch you out. People working for universities generally hate failing students (and not just becuase it's far mroe work than passing them). Viva examiners are just trying to make sure you did the work yourself and aren't guilty of plagiarism.
Post-grads should also be held to the higher standard of "is this original research of significance meriting a PhD" (and lets just externally check a post-doc or even a professor didn't do all the work for you, because you know, certain countries seem to have a ludicrously high PhD graduate to original thesis ratio). But that's obviously out of scope and unreasonable for undergrads.
This is still a wonderful idea. But far easier said than done. The real reason it will never happen however, is that it's far more expensive to organise even 100 interviews (2:1 for accountability and governance) even of only 5 minutes each, than it is to examine 100 students for up to 3 hours simultaneously.
Huh? (Score:2)
Isn't the point of school to check if you can function in the workplace? Nowadays everything is via email or chat anyway. Test on the ability to accomplish a task. chatGPT should enable people to do more tasks so just test that. Granted if a museum hires you as the expert on Egypt and you don't know King Tut from Cleopatra that might be a problem -- mainly because it's likely you didn't have any real interest in it. Given enough testing on it in college, you'd have no choice but to learn some of it though.
Resources (Score:3)
Calculators (Score:2)
Reminds of "Absence of Malice" (Score:2)
Spoiler Alert:
Wilford Brimley's character arrives on the scene, and puts the hotshot prosecutor through his paces, demanding he "show his work", so to speak.
https://havechanged.blogspot.c... [blogspot.com]
chatbots will become a memory aid (Score:2)
Job interview (Score:4, Interesting)
There's nothing wrong with this. (Score:2)
There's nothing wrong with the proposal as long as the university discloses that it uses this method.
However I suspect that it wouldn't end well for most universities that follow this path as doing so would dramatically increase its cost of doing business and would likely dramatically reduce the number of individuals interested in applying to the institution.
Though perhaps in the School of Education and the Arts at CQUniversity it might make more sense than in some of the other five schools at that universi
Australia (Score:3)
One thing to note here : this item comes from Australia. Australia is the only country I know with no viva component required on a PhD. One can be called for if there is suspicion of issues, or if a thesis is borderline, but is is not generally done. They could add that back quite easily.
Handwritten exams (Score:3, Interesting)
In this scenario... (Score:1)
Are they allowed electronic device?
How about electronic devices running any sort of wifi?
These are testing centers and classrooms correct?
If this were gonna be a future issue.
I would think folks getting caught with wikipedia etc would be an epidemic.
Practical problems... (Score:2)
I'm a prof, one that prefers teaching to research, and I've been teaching for...a long time.
Oral exams do work, but they are stressful for the students. You need two examiners, and about 20 minutes per student. The exams take a lot out of the examiners as well. If you have hundreds of students? Good luck with that.
Mostly, we do supervised exams on paper, no electronics allowed. Those still work just fine. You can also do exams on computers, but: if you want to be sure about cheating, they need to be the
Two Problems (Score:2)
The first is resources. You have a 40 student class? Well now you have 40-hours of examination to perform. And it better be done by the same examiner if you want a consistent grading standard. And you better make sure that you're not examining some of them right before lunch (or at the end of the day) when the examiner is tired, hungry, and generally grumpy.
The second problem is that complaints of bias on the part of the examiner go way up, both because there is more bias but also because the possibility of
Some challenges are ... (Score:2)
Oral exams aren't fair because students will receive different questions, different levels of probing, and different standards for grading. The only way to avoid this unfairness is to give the same questions to all students, but then that sort of defeats the motivation for the oral exam in the first place.
Many professors at top schools don't care much about teaching. Their compensation and reputation are based on publishing papers and receiving grant money. Teaching is just a distraction from doing resea
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There may well have been details to that case that meant that was the correct decision, but if there weren't the Dean should have replied back "Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention. After a formal review of the case, we have determined that the punishment was indeed too lenient and your child has been expelled. Thank you for your help with maintaining academic standards."
how about any exam at all (Score:2)
The admissions process is already corrupted by legacy admissions, so who cares.
Also: if you can't do better than a computer, maybe you shouldn't get in.
I suspect racial and gender bias would be worse (Score:2)
With paper tests, there's at least some shielding from gender and racial biases. We have seen in plenty of venues that hiding the face and/or voice of interviewees improves the ratings for women and minorities. In-person tests will likely suffer those biases even more directly.
If you are one professor,... (Score:2)
...and you have 120 students.
Let's say it takes you 8 to 10 hours to grade all their exams, normally. Maybe 2 hours for the exam, so 10 to 12 hours of your time.
Now you switch to oral exams. Say you allot 10 minutes per student (7 minutes really, a couple minutes on average for exchanges, maybe including a break somewhere).
So that's 1200 minutes, or 20 hours. Now we've roughly doubled the workload.
But now say you're supposed to get two other faculty to sit in as well, which means you'll be sitting in on th
College (Score:1)