I doubt oral examinations come back in general. The undergrad model relys on massive classes, I don’t see how you can do oral exams in those 300 person classes without massive cheating as the first students tell everyone else what to expect.
Where is everyone?
1. Demographic changes means more retirees, and smaller workforce. Literally less people to go around.
2. With low unemployment, everyone’s doing something else. Something harder to automate, or otherwise more valuable. It’s not like people are sitting around unemployed (except retirees).
What are they doing? It’s hard to know without combing through data in this moment, but people are surely avoiding minimum wage and low skill customer service jobs if alternatives exist in their area. Anecdotally, I hear people don’t like working in anything customer facing due to rude customers. I know someone in TX working at Amazon warehouses at an hourly rate much higher than retail workers rate. They used to work at a gym in rural California.
Until we get rising low-skill immigration to cover more of the low-wage work, expect service work to be understaffed. Or rising birth rates, or a drop in white collar workers.
A small point, but I think what you meant to say here is that there's a greater ratio of retired to employed people than there used to be, which is somewhat different than what you stated.
That said, I think this idea that we necessarily need some incredible amount of low-skill immigration to cover some drastic understaffing is bullshit propaganda put out to achieve bad wages and treatment of workers through basic supply and demand (drastically increasing the supply of labor). Technical innovations such as self-checkout lines and great security cameras and other tools of the modern age mean that you need fewer workers to do the same work.
As I think others have pointed out, the unemployment rate figures can be massaged in a lot of ways to be misleading. Actual wages should be the stat that tells you whether or not the workforce is too small. If wages are dropping or stagnant versus inflation, then claims of low unemployment should be considered laughable because otherwise wages would be increasing.
You also cannot trust the Department Of Labor's official statistics by themselves since there's multiple ways that the U.S. government covers up actual unemployment numbers. For example stay at home parents aren't included in the unemployment statistic even if they worked previous to that situation. People who have been unemployed for more than a year are not included. People on disability but who are in an employable state are not included. Gig workers such as GrubHub drivers are not included. Certain methods of self-employment such as traveling musicians are are not included. They pulled this trick a decade ago and they're doing it again to try and prevent another panic. The one difference this time is that instead of people losing a single full-time job like they did in 2008, many are now working multiple part-times and thus inflating the employment statistic slightly since technically they're never unemployed.
Then there's the gap that happens for employees. If someone has a part-time job and gets scheduled from noon to nine for closing back to back for four days and then gets nothing for the next three days that means they're not getting paid the equivalent of a full-time job despite possibly working just as many if not more hours. When you have lulls like this you need a second part-time job to fill them in, leading to things like ten percent of the current counted national workforce having at least two jobs. But many part-time jobs in retail and services want to monopolize the person's time since scheduling is based on the employer's availability and not the employee's, meaning that sometimes the employee will have to purposely dedicate days of their week to waiting in case either job calls them in. If the person doesn't have a free day and are called in while working one of their two jobs, they may be fired from the other job. When enough places and people have an incongruent schedule like this places run short staffed and the person is still wasting a day or maybe more idle. Then there's the other half of that coin of scheduling abuse, the supposed part-time job that uses that flexible scheduling to transform into a full-time job. I know that Wal-Mart will schedule you for no more than thirty hours a week and will stack your shifts back to back, sometimes with as little as eight hours in-between, just so they have enough leftover hours in your schedule that they can call you back to cover someone without pushing you into full-time or paying overtime. This makes working for Wal-Mart hell because you're rushed and then all but told to be on standby, giving you very little time for things like other jobs, appointments, household chores, and even self care. The end result of being yanked between two part-times or being held hostage by a full-time masquerading as a part-time is that eventually the potential employee gets cynical and stops applying for that kind of work entirely.
Yep, let's just exclude all the people who tell the real story here.
Every gen-z in my family (and neighbors!) also have 18-21 year-olds who are doing weird shit like working for two days up to a max of two weeks, then abandoning the job. I don't know what this is about ("working" once per quarter to get the work credits for Social Security?) or how this is captured by the stats, but they are by no means employed.
Get used to it. The emerging model is a virtual vending machine - if what you want isn't there, tough. If the machine breaks, well, sorry about your dollar, maybe it'll work next week.
If you want to talk to a human, start by getting rich. That costs extra.
That should have freed up lots of people to handle the special cases that fall through the cracks of the automation, but they're nowhere to be found.
And it is going to get far, far worse.
An oral exam isn’t the same as reading a written exam out loud. There are a set of learning outcomes defined in the syllabus. The examiner uses the learning outcomes to ask probing questions that start a conversation - emphasis on conversation. A conversation can’t be faked. A simple follow up question can reveal a student only has a shallow understanding of material. Or, the student could remember everything they’ve been told, but fail to make connections between learning outcomes. You can’t cram for an oral exam. You have to digest the course material and think about what things mean in context.
After all, students know what to expect on standardized tests. Some still do better than others :-).
It can. An examiner questions are gonna be parsed via covert Voice recognition,processed by ai and replies played back via a e. g. small headset(a magnet inside an ear cavity, accompanied by an induction loop wire around the neck(works fine,google "микронаушник магнит" in russian, it's popular here) , and it's not as hard as you may think.
I actively remind my students this when I teach, who honestly are less active post pandemic. It is something I worry about. And though my account is "anonymous", if you ever show up to my lectures, not as a student but just sitting in (I don't take attendance, idk if you walk off the street and want to sit in), you too are welcome to participate.
(Fwiw, there aren't really "PhD level lectures" so much as graduate lectures. Generally you stop taking classes at the end of year 2 in your PhD, which is equivalent to a masters. The distinction of the PhD is that you are learning to learn on your own. This does add extra context to why grad students ask for higher pay, especially at the non-conditional and candidate levels, as they're actually taking less resources from the school. E.g. I pay the school $10k/term (big round) for research credits, which requires no involvement from anyone. There no longer is the "student" part to my "51% student, 49% employee" split)
Good on you for allowing auditing. I had only one teacher in college who allowed people to audit my classes and he even fought the administration to give me credit for the class after I sheepishly approached him and asked if he would mind letting me taking the exam to make sure I understood the material. One of the most insightful classes I took my entire time in college
A well designed class session can be (can be) similar in that it provides a space and guidance for you to do 60 minutes of improving your brain, that let's be honest, you would otherwise half-ass at home. (Of course, the classroom is only part of what you're paying for, there are also assignments, feedback, etc.)
(Now, I grant you, in a room of 300, interaction is severely limited. I'm lucky my classes tend to have fewer than 20 people.)
If I give a lecture that you could have just watched a video of, I fell short.
It's tough to get right. I'm still working on it.
Absolutely. Even in the largest lectures, people can ask clarifying questions, live, from the subject matter expert. Likewise, the professor can look at the students' body language and realize that they've lost a significant portion of the class, and stop, slow down, and maybe prompt the class for questions.
There is an art to a good lecture, and it's definitely harder the larger the class, but good lectures cannot be replaced by recordings.
1. Real life lecturer that can be asked questions
2. Peers that you can meet and discuss both study-related and unrelated topics.
3. Language. Not relevant for intros, but advanced topics can be explained in more than one way, and as a student you not necessarily will be able to map between them.
4. Schedule. Self-pacing 6 different classes for 12 weeks may be harder than it looks. Instead, you can just attend classes.
5. Advanced topics. Online resources, especially videos become scarcer as you advance in your studies, more so if you are not in hot topic (e.g., CS). I still have some notes from classes I took as undergrad as a best source for the learned topics. Good luck finding video lectures about diagrammatic approach to real time dynamics of open spin systems.
Same goes the other way around, sometimes attending class is just not worth it, even without tons of online courses. I learned my E&M by just reading the official book during the lecture time (see 4.).
I've studied in the UK and EU, and I don't think I've ever been in a class larger than 40.
Note that the above only applies if the class is supposed to be a lecture. If it is supposed to be interactive then small classes are better. However many of the basic undergrad 1st year courses have been done so often the professor should already answer all possible questions if you keep listening. As you advance that becomes less and less true of course.
The professor hate teaching those classes, students hate attending them and as a result half the people will drop out before they get to experience the real classes.
Smaller schools and upper level classes generally just have fewer people.
Edit: Keep in mind that teaching is something the professor usually just puts up with, to get the resources and credibility to do the thing they are really passionate about (research or writing).
Having locked down thin-clients does not scale well enough to these sizes. Specially when there is usually multiple concurrent exams running at same time. On small scale it could be solution. A screen, keyboard and mouse with locked down thin client and simple editor.
For how much schools talk about how useful handwriting is at memorisation and such - I seldom see anybody in the working world pulling out some paper and handwriting notes. Schools seem to care more about teaching you to pass closed-book tests than they do about teaching you useful skills like how to create high quality, organised, and searchable notes.
Not the LLM part though.
Not only do you get a good sense of what they know, but you get a chance to give real individual feedback about what they need to focus on next.
Of course towards the end in order to get a qualification that a university will accept as entrance we will need to teach the kids to pass the standardised tests too.
There haven’t been technological advances in education that have overwhelmed the student teacher ratio in terms of effectiveness.
On some level we just have to accept this.
Fight fire with fire.
I've actually tested this with a VR app (with support for mobile also), and it actually works quite well.
It's bad enough that these things don't do a good job, don't basically function for the task, but what's as bad or worse is being forced to pretend you buy into it all like having to pretend to believe in some religion just to not get killed by everyone else.
I'm not a student and so far I have been free to judge all these ais as bad on a variety of fronts, and not use them (directly anyway, of course they are used behind the scenes in ways that affect me which I can't control). This would be hell.
I dunno about that level of automation. Maybe the proctors can use it to generate a big bag of questions beforehand, that they manually review, but generating them on the fly is just asking for trouble.
Administering the preset questions and responding to the student is a much better fit.
But you can do an oral exam along the lines of "explain to me how your project works" and that'll catch people who don't understand it regardless of whether or not they know the question in advance.
So I don't see a problem with telling "what to expect", but I do see a problem with 1 professor and one censor examining 300 students for for 30 minutes each.
Well that's easy: An AI will administer the oral exam and transcribe the oral answers from each person simultaneously, and possibly even grade it!
ChatGPT could have the exact same set of questions to ask. All students are independently taking the same exam at the same time, responding conversationally. ChatGPT asks all of them the same question, and then probes based on weaknesses in the responses. Grades the answer to that question, then moves on to the next.
Everyone got equal questions. Is there going to be inconsistency in how minor wording trips different followups? Sure. But it isn't clear that this randomness is worse than the subjective differences in how humans grade an essay response to a question.
If you give a pre-written test, you basically need to curve it because you don't really know how well the test aligns with your expectations of the class's understanding of the material. So you say "typically, about 20% of the class doesn't understand the course at all, 20% have a very good grasp..." etc, and then fit the written test results to the expected curve.
A one-on-one communication with a student allows you to directly gauge their understanding, allowing you to assign a grade. It doesn't matter how well or poorly the rest of the class understands the material, this student, sitting in front of me, has a "B" level understanding.
We should not encourage stack ranking (or a curve) as a way to stratify students because they joined the class with too many smarter people. Go read up about stack ranking, and why it's a horrific practice.
In a "grade on a curve" situation, it benefits you to drop the class if there's too many people you think smarter or more experienced than you. And it benefits you if you're smarter than them. And, thats a REALLY UGLY way to approach education.