I think it's a great way to handle exams and I wonder if we'll need to shift towards that in the future.
I agree. But there is a "gold rush" out there in the academic world where the idea is to offload more and more work to "on-line."
My son just started school at a respectable US university. Two of his five courses are entirely on-line. A third course (genetics) is done in person, but the exams and quizzes are done on-line.
I overhead three undergraduates talking about how easy it is to defeat the anti-cheating software for their on-line courses ("The professors don't review the videos...Just hold your phone out of view of your laptop camera and google the answers...I've never been caught ...).
It was disheartening and I told my son to avoid on-line classes in the future because he was just putting himself at a disadvantage.
The meat of the matter really comes down to the professors and how they approach the exams. Generalized essay prompts are hilariously easy to cheat on; complex hyper specific prompts that extend on something specifically discussed in the class are far harder. On-line classes, by their "mass distributional" nature (ie, save money by making them reusable) are almost by definition far more generalized than you would want.
Until the professor actually asks real questions and grades them as they should be graded. Then the students complain, and the grades are "renormalized" or whatever euphemism they use. And certainly in the US, students have a lot of influence, since they're the paying clients. It's really not surprising that employers ask academic titles for so many entry-level jobs.
> I told my son to avoid on-line classes in the future because he was just putting himself at a disadvantage.
At a disadvantage for what?
For learning the material - sure, when an easy avenue for cheating with obvious incentives is available, it's unreasonable to expect people not to take advantage of it. Also, I expect that teachers have significant incentives to reduce their lecture efforts - why read the room, modify the lecture in response to Q&A, and tailor curriculum to the actual class progress, when you can just push "play" on the recording from last semester?
On-line classes give him an advantage for getting a piece of paper from a respectable US university, however - less work, same piece of paper, same results as far as job eligibility and resume eye-catchers...
I'm sure you enjoy being contrarian, but I also suspect you know precisely what I meant.
In the short-term, yeah, what's the big deal? But in the long-term, this devalues the courses and the degrees.
It's not in the long-term interest of the universities to behave this way because the course they offer are, ostensibly, a way of determining who understands the material and who doesn't.
Also some people have hard time breaking the rules even when they know that everyone else is breaking those rules and they are unlikely to get caught. We probably want to discourage systems that give cheaters advantage over honest people.
- Pressure to actually talk and perform. In a written exam I can stop, look at the paper and take my time to actually start. In an oral exam I have the professor looking at me. Less time to actually think.
- It's harder to communicate orally with complex subjects than in written form. Add to that the extra cognitive load of not dealing with your native tongue.
- Time constraints on oral exams punish students that don't learn everything by memory but can reason in real-time. I didn't know by heart a certain proof, I know for sure I could have done it in a written exam with time to spare (it wouldn't have been the first time) but I wasn't quick enough for an oral one.
- Mental blocks are much harder in oral exams. Some times I blank out and forget something basic (e.g., the derivative of a logarithm). In a written exam I can stop, think, and solve it. In an oral exam, the "stopping" is already making you look like you don't know things, adding pressure that will make you underperform.
Written exams have been the norm for decades for a reason. Far easier to actually ask the things you want, they scale far more easily, easier to correct and grade, and easier for students to practice and perform well.
American oration is generally awful. Talent in it command a premium. Perhaps this is related to our lack of oral examination ? We’re more comfortable with written argument because that’s how we’re taught to think?
But, in general, oral communication is harder than written. Written form allows you to take time to form sentences, correct mistakes, reorder thoughts, follow an outline... Oral communication, on the other hand, forces you to think and speak in parallel. It's always going to be harder.
In my opinion such examinations and written finals succeed in filtering out people who can only regurgitate what they have been spoon fed in class rather than being able to use that information to move forward. I think I was lucky to study when and where I did, it stood me in good stead in industry.
Of course there are some people who really do find such examinations difficult. In my opinion the solution is to provide assistance to those people to do better rather than throw the baby out with the bath water.
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.
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.
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.
Universities can also crib from how law school exams work if they want to still do written examinations.
I wouldn't argue that it is a system without issues but it's still better than rote essay writing.
I know lots of extroverts who are terrified of speaking in front of others and introverts who love it.
I think this is easier for people who are good at speaking but I think exercises like this will develop the skill.
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 still absolutely hated doing it though.
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.
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.
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.
everything else in life will reward being well spoken and outgoing, why shouldnt school as well?
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.
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.
While anyone can go into khan academy and learn/perform any subject, having an actual person would be tremendously costly. It's strange, when computerized education appeared I thought the cost of education would plummet, now its going to go all the way up.