Oral Exams

Now with on line education, oral exams may be more relevant than ever. A college course is a high-stakes endeavor for a student. Not only is there a financial burden associated with taking the class (or failing the class), but retaking a class can delay the student's graduation (and paycheck) and higher GPAs can make getting scholarships possible and eventually make the student a more desirable candidate to hire.

With all of this pressure to do well in a class, it is easy to see why cheating during an unproctored, online exam may be so tempting. So how can instructors really assess the student's learning? One option, if the class size is small enough, is to include an oral exam component in the assessment. The full exam includes a written component and the oral component. The oral exam itself takes about 20 minutes and with internet video it only takes a few seconds to switch from one student to the next. Typically I will schedule 3 or 4 exams a day over a course of a week which means that for a class of 20 I spend about an hour a day for five days to administer the oral exams. If the class size is over 20 then the administrative burden may be to great to consider using oral exams.

Many students have never had an oral exam in any of their courses and do not know what to expect or how to prepare for an oral exam. For that matter a lot of engineering instructors do not know how to run an oral exam. Some practices that may be useful for both students and instructors for oral exams in undergraduate engineering education are provided below.