Absolutely the easiest solution would have been to have a written exam on the cases and concepts that we discussed in class. It would take a few hours to create and grade the exam.
But at a university you should experiment and learn. What better class to experiment and learn than the “AI Product Management”. Students were actually intrigued by the idea themselves.
The key goal: we wanted to ensure that the projects that students submitted was actually their own work, not “outsourced” (in a general sense) to teammates or to an LLM.
Gemini 3 and NotebookLM with slide generation were released in the middle of the class, and we realized that it is feasible for a student to have a flaweless presentation in front of the class, without understanding deeply what they are presenting.
We could schedule oral exams during the finals week, which would be a major disruption for the students, or schedule exams during the break, violating university rules and ruining students vacation.
But as I said, we learned that AI-driven interviews are more structured and better than human-driven ones, because humans do get tired, and they do have biases based on who is the person they are interviewing. That’s why we decided to experiment with voice AI for running the oral exam.