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Comment by eaglefield | Hacker News Reader

At the price per student it probably makes sense to run some voluntary trial exams during the semester. This would give students a chance to get acquainted to the format, help them check their understanding and if the voice is very intimidating allow them to get used to that as well.

As an aside, I'm surprised oral exams aren't possible at 36 students. I feel like I've taken plenty of courses with more participants and oral exams. But the break even point is probably very different from country to country.

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They mention this at the end of the article:

> And here is the delicious part: you can give the whole setup to the students and let them prepare for the exam by practicing it multiple times. Unlike traditional exams, where leaked questions are a disaster, here the questions are generated fresh each time. The more you practice, the better you get. That is... actually how learning is supposed to work.

Oral exams scale fine. A TA makes $25 per hour, and an oral exam is going to take an hour at most. I absolutely would not accept a $25 tuition rebate in exchange for having my exam administered by an LLM.

But you'll accept the results of an exam for a (in the US) $1000+ course given by a TA that makes about the same as a delivery driver? And you'll trust their assessment of the results? There's so much wrong with this idea, I don't even know where to start.

Obviously the session should be recorded & transcribed. If you take issue with your mark, you can escalate it to the professor, same as you would for a written exam.

If you're looking for suggestions, I'd love for you to start with a problem that isn't trivially fixable.

At my university (Charles University in Prague), we had oral exams for 200+ people (spread over many different sessions).

> spread over many different sessions

this is also known as 'logistical nightmare', but yeah it's the only reasonable way if you want to avoid being questioned by robots.

Ah yes, the logistical nightmare any hair salon or nail studio handles just fine.

these shops do nothing but 'exams'. no teaching, no research, no papers, no students. comparison is valid for ~2 weeks in a year, maybe.

Impressive!

I think the most I experienced at the physics department in Aarhus was 70ish students. 200 sounds like a big undertaking.

Of course they are possible! But it would take a fraction of a day's tuition to pay for a TA to do it, so they want to make a god damn chatbot to do it... Good lord.

They're even more possible if you do an oral exam only on the highest grades. That's the purpose, isn't it? To see if a good, very good, or excellent student actually knows what they're talking about. You can't spare 10 minutes to talk to each student scoring over 80% or something? Please

>As an aside, I'm surprised oral exams aren't possible at 36 students.

It depends on how frequent and how in-depth you want the exams to be. How much knowledge can you test in an oral exam that would be similar to a two-hour written exam? (Especially when I remember my own experience where I would have to sketch ideas for 3/4th of the time alloted before spending the last 1/4th writing frenetically the answer I found _in extremis_).

If I were a teacher, my experience would be to sample the students. Maybe bias the sample towards students who give wrong answers, but then it could start either a good feedback loop ("I'll study because I don't want to be interrogated again in front of the class") or a bad feedback loop ("I am being picked on, it is getting worse than I can improve, I hate this and I give up")

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