Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's very apparent to both student and teachers how well a topic is understood. Marks are rarely contested and in my experience most students think the process is fair.

Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....

This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments.

But what it does threaten to do is effectively abandon all the efficiencies of the written word.

When higher education evolved into a mass system in the 1800s and into the 1900s, pure oral examination was looked at as super inefficient. A written paper could be handed in and graded without lining everyone up in front of a panel.

The oral system scales poorly. One examiner can only hear so many students in a day. There are damn good reasons Medieval universities were small and modern ones are not.

Requiring every major paper to be defended live reintroduces the bottleneck that written exams were designed to escape.

Accessibility takes a hit too. Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective? This does not seem very logical, or sensitive.

So while it’s nice that academics are rediscovering the old ways, I don’t really see this as a scalable answer to raising education levels for the masses, but more of a knee jerk way to try to bypass the obvious technological disruption by returning to non-scalable, inaccessible ways of doing things that our ancestors abandoned for a reason.

It has its place for graduate students and smaller volume education systems. It’s fine for keeping the ivory tower clean. But it’s not the answer to expanding education to everyone and taking advantage of the technological disruption to advance education and learning throughout greater humanity, which is what AI definitely possesses as a possibility.

Oral Defences have a long established tradition in Denmark, but recently there’s been real cut back on this as a money saving exercise. So both teachers and Students are familiar with this form of examination.

So for a dane this reads like “back to the old way”, rather than anything new or novel.

As an educator myself, this quarter for the first time for my course's final project, I've switched to actually asking my students to provide an "AI Authenticity Audit" of their (project-relevant) chats in the construction of said projects. All my students' output over the last two years went from pre-AI level quality to boardroom-ready polish, and I'm actually more interested to see how they arrive at an outcome rather than the final output itself - focusing on their questioning, curating, editing, and iterating process. Didn't think we'd get to somewhere like this so soon, but here we are. Strange, but I'm trying it out.

In my high school English class (like 10 years ago) my teacher assigned readings and called on a random person each day to give an overview of a section. He basically quizzed you in front of the class on themes, plots, etc. It was very effective at getting me to read and care for that class, because if you just sat up there and didn't know anything you'd lose marks on participation (and look kind of dumb). Not sure if/when/why oral presentations and public speaking are no longer got prioritized.

I had to do an oral defense of my thesis in graduate school. When you've spent months and months writing something extremely obscure... well, I'd hope that it's not that difficult.

Why is everyone in this thread comparing this to a University

But yeah, this is a good step.

Homework is also becoming obsolete at this point. If they can't do it with pen and paper in class, there's no reliable way to evaluate work anymore.

I'm quite impressed with the Hungarian system, for 18-19 year old school leavers, where every subject is split 50/50 between:

  - Írásbeli (written) - standardised written exam, centrally set and marked
  - Szóbeli (oral) - the panel interview

The oral (szóbeli) has:

  - A committee of 2-3 teachers sits as a panel
  - The student draws a topic at random from a list
  - They get prep time (usually 15-20 mins)
  - They present their answer to the panel
  - The panel asks follow-up questions and probes understanding

This is great. Sorry, but the Western World has to stop normalizing extreme introvertism. Humans are social. We rely on communication and cooperation to survive. Allowing kids to shelter themselves from interaction and communication during crucial development stages will only hamper them in life.

The problem with oral exam is that it’s done serially student by student, which can be infeasible with large classes. The grading is also highly subjective.

Written exams are also not best suited to project-based classes.

What’s the best way to grade students in classes with coding projects?

It feels like systems like the Maturita' final multi-day exam in Italy do a pretty good job at providing students with a standardized, state-supervised process for demonstrating one's competence by the end of high school. No computers, you're under the watchful eye of your teachers the whole time, nobody knows what's going to be on the exam until the day of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matura#Italy

It's time consuming and nerve-wracking, but it feels fair.

I wish we were doing this in the US even before AI was an issue. I suspect it would reorient students to their work in some pretty cool ways. I mean, it might feel like torture for some and maybe that’s not so much a bad thing. I’m sure I’m not thinking of some downsides to this too, but it seems like such a great counter against “factory” schooling. Of course, this could be a lot more work for faculty and could be hard to keep up with a huge student population. Again, maybe a feature more than a bug.

It was already long-standing practice, when I was teaching many many years ago, to interview suspected cheaters (it's usually quite obvious) to see if they actually knew what they claimed they knew.

The Conversation has an article that supports raising expectations for students, given that they have access to AI

https://theconversation.com/mit-researchers-say-using-chatgp...

My entire university education was evaluated mostly by proctored closed book exams and oral defenses. AI proof 10 years before AI.

This just feels like good educational practice too? I remember really enjoying TA'ing as an undergrad for courses I took the previous year, because THAT'S when I felt I _really_ learned the material.

Likewise, when I was a lab consultant, I felt like advising others was when the concepts of Linux/systems administration _really_ sunk in.

I always crammed the bare minimum for any kind of assessment (by the end of college I was actively avoiding any classes with final exams), but when I need to be able to teach someone else or explain my understanding in a live environment? That's when I _actually_ learn.

Oral exams were the norm when I studied. Even for technical topics.

This is how we used to grade labs when I was a TA in college. Students worked in groups of two and showed up with a working project to get graded. Afterwards, we'd ask the two students questions and it was extremely obvious if one or both of them didn't work on it.

Somehow Russian technical universities were never relying on written work, there is some, but even that is is delivered in person with the tute teacher asking this and that.

Tangentially, the market for uni assignments (mostly humanities) for pay was huge before AI.

Good to see.

Related, I've moved to requiring regular in-class handwritten quizzes. Just a blank piece of paper to start, with the questions on the board. The practice forces students to recognize whether they are learning specific topics.

Side note/ anecdote.

When I was in school there was a maths aural test. The teacher read out questions and you wrote the answers, with no calculator. Basically a stupid name for a mental arithmetic test. The funny thing was the teachers were so at pains to differentiate between two words that sound basically the same in our local accent, aural and oral, that they insisted on pronouncing aural as "ow-eral' the ow being pronounced like a pain reaction sound. The smarter kids took to teasing the teacher with words like aura and aurora, and asking how to pronounce them...

As a thought experiment: In-person testing or oral defense approaches work until we get implants. If people have implants, what then? Demand that the implant be turned off? Demand that the implant's data connection be turned off? In the latter case, the person with more storage or a better local model wins.

In the long run, in the AGI world, if everyone has implants, then everyone is roughly equal because computer-aided computation will be better than what any individual can do. Those without implants are screwed.

(I don't want an implant; nor do I want others to have implants.)

I’ve studied CS in Italy and most if not all exams were both written and oral some also had labs. I thought it was the same for other degrees too.

Fun story: Final oral exam (in history, I believe -- a thing back then), I took a whole A4 paper and turned it into hundreds of little balls in front of 3 teachers over the duration of the oral exam.

I had no idea I was doing this until one of the teacher pointed to the heap in front of me, but it saved my bacon as I did otherwise well.

In my uni years bachelors, masters and PhDs required thorough research resulting in a huge opus printed and stitched together but the only thing that really mattered was the presentation of the work in front of the committee and oral defenses. To this day I have been living in full confidence that this is the academic standard that has been in place and effective (with variations) over centuries, if not millenias…

Even intermediate exams were a combinations of practical work in some written form and the theoretical grill sessions in the end of every semester.

All in all, if I had to put a professor’s hat today I would not give a sh.. if my students would use LLMs to write text. What would matter (and what does for me as a hiring manager at $WORK) and a human being with decency is the results of the _natural neural network_ training so to speak. IF whatever prompts and interactions with LLMs result in sharp knowledge of the subject and ability to apply the knowledge to solving real problems, well done and congrats!

I wrote about assessing students in the era of AI from when I was teaching at Carnegie Mellon: https://austinhenley.com/blog/aihomework.html

This is a good move. I teach a summer async remote course that's ending next week, but I'm giving all the students incompletes until they come back to campus and take an in-person exam the first week of classes. All homework is worth a marginal amount, and if they fail the final they fail the class.

I'm not going to spend my effort policing whether they're using AI or not in their class work because it's a losing battle. At the end of the day, they can either demonstrate mastery of the material at an exam or not. It makes the exams higher stakes, but that's where we are.

I find it quite surprising that Danish high school students (the article isn't about university) apparently did write digital exams with internet access until now, so basically open book.

This is a great strategy. It is something I do in code reviews as a senior developer. There has been observed longer code reviews for seniors and this kind of approach keeps it manageable.

This is and have always been the case for Masters and above across Europe. It varies for Licentiates.

It is also often the case for exams in majors (they are often oral).

So nothing innovative there

Couldn't students ask AI to make a oral defense plan?

Good!

Prevents AI being used to one shot the writing and helps them practice public speaking as well (even for people like me who hate public speaking).

in the french CPGEs they have you make a mini research project to be presented in front of 2/3 judges at the end of the 2 years, each year has it's own theme (this year it's efficiency/optimisation) thankfully it doesn't need to be very deep, but it has to tie somewhat into the curriculum which can be annoying

In slovenia, at least in most engineering colleges, every exam was a combination of written + oral, way before AI even existed.

From my conversation with some undergraduates, 99% of people are using LLMs for any applicable assignment.

Seems inefficient, why not just distribute a version history with the document?

A nice plot twist would be if those tests were administered by an AI.

I mean, this is pretty much the easiest way of handling the problem.

When I was teaching in a university the easiest thing to test someone's understanding was a simple question: "Explain me how would you use this in a day-to-day situation."

If the guy knows his business, he'll go on a long lecture obsessing over every new feature of C# 2.0 or PHP 3. He would give you all the differences between Firefox 3.5.1 and IE 6 with Maxthon. (Goddamn I'm freaking old)

Should you not find a spark of interest but just random mumbo-jumbo of words that don't constitute sentences, you can clearly see that there is no understanding present in the subject.

In this case you work as a teacher, helping the guy to figure out what he does not understand in a subject and simplifying things for him till this clicks. After that he will be able to talk about said subject for hours with gusto.

Brillant! <- I had AI write that.