Oral Exams

No, Not This Kind of Oral Exam

From the Wall St. Journal and UCOP Daily News Clips:

When the pandemic closed classrooms in March of 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 which 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 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 which 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 into professors were generated almost entirely by artificial intelligence.*

The trajectory threatens the business model of higher education. In May, the ratings company Moody’s said concerns around cheating and plagiarism tied to artificial intelligence are a credit risk to the sector. 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 UCSD and a member of the International Center for Academic Integrity...

Full story at https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-colleges-cheating-oral-exams-286e0091.

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*As we have noted in prior posts, UCLA does not use Turnitin for detection of AI cheating because it is not sufficiently reliable.