Professors Use Oral Exams to Foil AI Cheats.

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"When the pandemic closed classrooms in March 2020 and forced remote teaching, a top engineering student at the University of California, San Diego anxiously expressed concern to a professor that her classmates would cheat, bend the class curve and lower her grade.

Prof. Huihui Qi considered the dilemma and introduced a testing method with a 2,000-year-old record that is today largely ignored: oral exams.

"The students were nervous," Qi said. "None of them had taken exams like this before."

That initiative led to a three-year research experiment that has now stretched across 7,000 oral exams. It comes as a wave of professors around the world are experimenting with oral exams to improve teaching and learning and to discourage cheating.

Qi believes the oral exams can push students past rote memorization, prompt them to think on their feet and reveal a student's conceptual understanding of the subject matter better than most written exams. They are also very hard to hack.

The upbeat assessment comes at a perilous moment for the nation's universities. Nearly two-thirds of college students admitted to cheating before the pandemic, according to the International Center for Academic Integrity, which researches cheating.

When the pandemic hit, plagiarism increased, according to Turnitin, a company that sells a plagiarism-detection system. ChatGPT, which became accessible to the public last year, added another variable. This spring, Turnitin found about 4% of papers turned in to professors were generated almost entirely by artificial intelligence.

If a degree no longer designates legitimate academic achievement it will cease to hold value, said Tricia Bertram Gallant, a director of the academic integrity office at UC San Diego and a member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

Schools are scrambling to address the fast-moving threat. Baylor University asked professors to require students to write assignments in class by hand if possible. Next fall, Stanford University will proctor some exams. Student newspaper editors at Middlebury College have called for a reconsideration of the school's honor code after a survey found two-thirds of students admitted to breaking it.

The pressure has led to a "groundswell of interest" in oral examinations, said Stephen Dobson, dean of education at Central Queensland University in Australia.

Oral exams date back at least to ancient Greece, when Socrates famously questioned students in Athens. They were the traditional method of testing at universities for hundreds of years and remain popular across many European nations today, Dobson said. In the 17th century, written exams supplanted them in most English-speaking countries, largely because they are more efficient at scale and offer more precise measurements.

Among the few U.S. students who routinely take an oral examination today are doctoral candidates defending their dissertations. Dobson said U.S. colleges are missing an opportunity because oral exams mimic many of the demands in the real world and are great training for job interviews.

At UC San Diego, Qi's experiment drew attention across the university's engineering department. With funds from a research grant, she arranged seven professors teaching nine different engineering classes to experiment with various forms of oral tests and determine which design was the most fair, effective and efficient.

The exams generally last between 10 minutes and 15 minutes and consist of several questions. Students answer them, then explain why they approached the problem the way they did.

To grade consistently, instructors in the UC San Diego pilot use the same keywords when they ask a question and wait the same amount of time -- about 8 seconds -- before speaking if a student pauses. Instructors also coordinate when and how to nudge a student who may be heading in the wrong direction or to validate their answers if they are correct.

One video of an exam with Qi is punctuated by encouragement and positive reinforcement.

"In some classes you can memorize a process and then on a written exam you can just plug and chug, you follow the process, you don't really have to understand what you're doing with all those calculations," said Isabella Fiorini, a junior studying mechanical engineering at UC San Diego. "But on an oral exam you have to explain why you're doing what you're doing."

Nearly two-thirds of students report they are more highly motivated to learn the subject when they have an oral exam, according to the research of Qi and her team. Grades increase by about 10%. The lowest-performing students have shown the greatest improvement.

The exams haven't completely eliminated cheating. Instructors have suspected some students have had classmates standing just out of view of the camera as they answer questions online. She described the efforts as clumsy and pretty easy to detect but difficult to prove. "Some students' answers are a little weird and sound unnatural," she said. "When we ask follow-up questions, they can't answer."" [1]

1.  U.S. News: Professors Use Oral Exams to Foil AI Cheats. Belkin, Douglas. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 02 June 2023: A.3.