The New York Sophist

I’ve been doing some reading into the long tradition of the oral exam, something we’ve given up on in the United States. In many other countries the oral exam isn’t just normal, it’s expected. Some countries even require an oral exam to graduate from university.

The standard format is a series of questions that are predictable and that you can prepare for, with the occasional follow-up for clarification or depth from the student. Sometimes they can take an hour or perhaps a few hours if it’s for something as important as conferring a degree.

I’m not sure why we gave up this tradition in the U.S. It seems to be a good time to recover it due to the immense panic we have over interviews and the immense panic we have over assessment in higher education.

Not much needs to be said about interview panic. All you have to do to get a sense of the level of concern is google “interview tips” or something like that. You’ll be quickly overwhelmed with the desire of others to help you (for a small fee of course).

Assessment might be less familiar to readers. It’s the realization in higher education that grades do not correspond with student ability. That is, a student could make an A in a course and have no idea how do do any of the things that the course is supposed to teach them how to do. I don’t know why higher education is just now realizing this; this is the obivous result to me of a system that focuses on obedience, discipline, and following arbitrary directions (everything from how to turn something in to how many spaces must be between punctuation and the next letter) over anything else. The university experience is one that primarily consists of being belittled by instructors for not following 17 pages of formatting guidelines in a document archaically termed “the syllabus.” It’s anything but that, if you look into the history of the term.

Oral examinations are a chance to hear and see the student express knowledge and express familiarity with the course as a whole. It can be imagined as a presentation, but that’s not the best way to do it. Instead, imagine it as a conversation about the course. One that you and the student can have together privately, or you can have it with the class observing in order to help them learn and see how they could phrase or think about what they got out of the class.

My model for an oral exam is pretty simple:

There will be 2 major questions – both are about something that the course is expressly about. Up front in my courses I tell the students directly what the question is that the course is meant to explore.

The third will be something the student can choose from. I might give them 2 or 3 choices around an issue that came up in class, came up for them in previous work across the class (for example, in my current course on argumentation, all the students are clinging to structural concerns as the heart of any attempt to say what argumentation should or could be. That would become an issue later on to offer in an oral exam question).

The most interesting part of the oral exam is that I will write names, concepts, titles of readings, or theories on notecards. I come up with as many as I can, then I ask the student to choose 10 off the top. They have to speak about each one for about 3 minutes. They are permitted to discard 2 and draw again. This could be the entire exam, and might be a good way to do oral quizzes, or a way of checking up on student retention and understanding through the term.

Although there’s a lot of research out there on oral exams, it seems particularly embarrassing that in my field, speech communication or rhetoric, there is little to no discussion about this. We rely on objective fallacy quizzes, final seminar papers, and the like without any appreciation at all for the irony. Why do we not showcase the capacity and power of oral communication not only to assess what we teach, but across the university as the best way to get a glimpse of what sort of capacity our students have after taking our courses?

“Finger pointing at the Moon” is a famous koan that has been rewritten and offered so many times that the search for the origin of this early teaching lesson might as well be lost. As a koan we can accept it as a case that is worth our investigation, a case that everyone must investigate and try to answer. In Buddhism, the koan is a method of teaching that attempts to get students of Buddhist thought into the sort of thinking and attitude that Buddhism as a religion, or thought-system, requires. It’s a tool of critical thinking we could say, one that pushes on your ability to think in a new discourse or a new discipline.

I’ve often borrowed “finger pointing at the moon” to talk about teaching and pedagogy and every year, at the start of the year, my mind drifts back toward it for another go. Although there’s obviously a lot we can say about this koan right now it has me thinking about the relationship to grades and the privileged discourse of the teacher.

We talk a lot in pedagogy about the authority of the teacher and how the teacher can often be a source of disciplinary or other troubling power. I’ve written before – many years ago – about the great Chinese proverb “It is a pleasurable thing to teach.” This has an ambivalent sort of meaning, that the teacher can often be overcome by their own position, thinking they are doing a lot of good when they are really just causing a lot of suffering. There’s also the great Paulo Friere quote, “A teacher must be an authority without being authoritarian.” And Staughton Lynd’s great saying, “You shouldn’t be standing in front of your students, but shoulder to shoulder with them on the issues of the time.” These are all very meaningful teaching ideas to me, and I think about them a lot. I’m not sure what they all mean for my teaching practice, but they are definitely tools for me to reiterate it. The biggest block I find in my way though, is grades.

Grades are the ultimate finger, and most of the teaching authority relies on grades. The reason students attend to what you say and ask and do is because they are concerned about grades. In this sense you are the arm extending the finger, pretty far removed from learning or knowledge in that sense. Grades have too much authority and control in order to be valuable at all. They really best serve as a lighthouse that helps you and the student avoid the shoals.

The other concern with grades that I’m noticing is that they boost a real sense of confidence among students who probably should be a lot more humble and questioning of their own abilities. It’s like they borrowed a book about some topic, and they carry it around, thinking that their presence with the borrowed book is what learning looks like.

The university will not be able to compete with the rising certificate programs, particularly if major companies start to accept or prefer the certificate program over the traditional four year degree. Grades are thought about too much as the evidence of learning and not what they serve as, the payment for labor. The analogy needs to be rethought. Students think of grades as what they deserve for sitting though a class and doing what is asked of them. Professors think of grades as a way to control student behavior and judge student ability. Neither is a good way to think about grades.

Let’s get grades out of the way and move to a system where professors help students create a portfolio of work that showcases what they are best able to do. If you are teaching a public speaking class, like me, this means some sort of recordings. Wouldn’t it be a better use of a semester to help mentor students through a process of reiteration on a presentation to make it look and sound really good for larger audiences? Wouldn’t that be more valuable than giving them a quiz about some made up outline structure that only has value in a glossy, overpriced textbook?

What’s the moon here? What does it mean to get it in a class like public speaking? What should students be able to do at the end of such a course? These are the questions we should use to drive our course, not textbook chapters, quizzes, and midterm exams.