“I remember feeling like I was maybe going to die,” Phil Gressman of Mathematics says, about his first time taking an oral exam. The exam in question was the qualifying exam for his PhD. Luckily, the brush with mortality was fleeting: “five minutes in,” he recalls, “it was fine.”
In 2020, when the pandemic forced Gressman to re-evaluate how he was testing his students’ learning, he considered the oral exam format. He thought it might be an opportunity to have his students learn, in a much lower stakes way, that an oral exam was not fatal and might even be "a friendlier way of doing assessment.”
So he swapped the final written exam with an oral exam. In 30-minute Zoom sessions, Gressman would begin by asking students “What do you want to talk about?” Then, Gressman would ask them one of the questions he had prepared beforehand that was related to their interests. Rather than assessing students' ability to do live computations or recite facts off the top of their head, the conversations gave Gressman the opportunity to assess their deeper learning across the course material. If he wasn’t sure they understood a concept, he could ask follow-up questions. “I felt like I got a better sense of what's going on.”
But what about student stress? Did the oral exam feel fatal for them, like it did for Gressman? While they might have been nervous heading into the exam, Gressman says students ultimately felt more aligned with how they were assessed. This was also part of Gressman’s design. During the exam, Gressman would share his screen, where he took notes on their conversation, giving the students opportunities to further confirm or clarify their point as expressed in his transcript. After it was over, students had fewer questions about their final grades: “The students came away with a clear sense of how they had done, which is not always the case for a written exam.”
Gressman has continued the practice since 2020, with very few changes to his system. “My takeaway is that I’m a super big fan of oral exams,” he says.
Gressman isn’t alone. Faculty have found oral exams to be useful assessment tools. The dual forces of academic disruption — a global pandemic dovetailed by the introduction of generative AI —have combined to raise important questions for faculty across Penn: How do we know students are learning? How can we show we value the process of learning, not just the end result?
The oral exam, assessment, or check-in, is gaining traction as one way to potentially address concerns about inappropriate AI use so that students can show what they authentically know and how they think. Faculty share that oral exams are helping in that arena. But what they also share is the surprise bonus: the stress associated with exams also seems to dissipate in an oral assessment— for faculty and their students.
