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Comment by goldemerald | Hacker News Reader

I did an oral final exam for my theory of computation class. From the student perspective, it was nicer than an in person final as I knew I didn't have to have perfect prose in my answers (and that it only took 30 mins rather than 2 hours!). But the professor said he'd never do it again because 30 minutes * 30ish students was too much work.

I cannot imagine a return to oral exams in the current academic setting with huge class sizes. The only place I could them being useful is in tiny honors/grad classes where the professor already has a close familiarity with each of the students.

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> the professor said he'd never do it again because 30 minutes * 30ish students was too much work.

So he prefers spending that time grading written exams? Or does he just dump the burden on a platoon of grad students? (And if you're going to do that, why not have the grad students administer the oral exam?)

Oral exams combine administration and grading, so it can actually be less time consuming and less effort to give them. You can also vary questions based on whether previous answers already answer later questions, probing as you go along. The point of exams isn't supposed to be a bureaucratic checking off of boxes. It's supposed to be an assessment of familiarity with the taught material.

> But the professor said he'd never do it again because 30 minutes * 30ish students was too much work.

The old German Diplom system (replaced by BSc/MSc about 15 years ago) was based on oral exams. The way this worked there was that there were much fewer exams. For example, in Computer Science I had my first oral exams two years into the degree, and there were only five of them: one in Mathematics, one in each of Theoretical, Practical and Applied, Computer Science, and one for the second subject. Each of these oral exam was 30 minutes but covered the content of four semesters. There was a second round of such exams at the end of the degree and that was it.

To be admitted to an oral exam, one needed to pass the courses that the exam was going to be about. Lecturer were free to set the passing requirements. It was often just something like a coursework threshold of 60%.

I can almost imagine a world where professors use AI to transcribe oral exams and then apply some kind of logic to grade the results haha.

> But the professor said he'd never do it again because 30 minutes * 30ish students was too much work.

imagine 15 hours of work being too much work.

15 hours of focused attention is a lot more effort then 40 hours of reading papers.

Could you not use a live transcription software that would make it easier than assessing a written exam?

How so?

By auto-grading the transcript as if it were an open ended written exam with no answer key, ignoring the confidence of the candidate and any nonverbalities that would be significant in an oral exam.

How does that reduce the 30 minutes of focused attention that the oral evaluators will have to spend per candidate?

Said by the same kind of people who won't come into the office anymore for 8 hours ...

Simply coordinating meeting with 30 individuals within a single week is really difficult--think about how long it takes a manager to deal with annual reviews for everybody.

you're talking to me? i work a blue collar job. i've worked a fair few 15 hour days.

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