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?

The biggest hazard from teaching online I think is that you get huge waves of grading that have very firm time requirements.

If I assign students to prepare a speech 6 minutes long, I have to listen to 40 or so 6 minute speeches. There’s nothing I can do to reduce that amount of time at all.

It could be argued that if you assign papers you have a bit more control over how long it takes you to grade, and you can shorten it, but I am not sure that’s true at all. For me, reading student papers always takes longer than listening to them speak. I think even with the fixed 6 minute speech I’m still doing pretty good with classtime on grading. I’m hoping to turn everything around by Saturday so we’ll see how it goes (everything came in last night).

In my other course where I would traditionally assign a paper I have been allowing students to present their ideas either by recording themselves on a powerpoint or submitting an audio file as the assignment. I’m hoping to work a bit more on oral assessment, and giving students multiple opportunities to practice speaking their ideas to others.

The power of oratory cannot be denied now more than ever. The deluge of podcasts and the dominance of video calls, vlogging, and websites like TED Talks and The Moth show that the power of speech is not something old or less important than writing. It is not writing, but it is definitely composition. Unfortunately most people in my field teach public speaking as the transmission of facts and truths from research, which is extremely thin and limiting. Speech creates understanding in incredible ways since it is ephemeral, immersive, and helps us feel our way through ideas as we listen to the persons speech patterns, tone, and how they adjust what they are saying as they go.

My focus will be to push for more casual recordings, more one-take recordings, and more supplemental or response recordings as students interact with one another’s work. I hope that by December we’ll be in a place where submitting a voice memo from the phone is at the same level of critical engagement that a nice paper would be. Considering how little time college students spend on papers, I feel that this might be a good way to practice critical thinking.