University professors across the United States are increasingly turning to oral examinations—a testing method dating back to ancient institutions in Rome, Greece, and India—to combat widespread cheating enabled by AI platforms like ChatGPT.
Catherine Hartmann, a religious studies professor at the University of Wyoming, began using 30-minute one-on-one oral exams last year after discovering a student in 2023 had used AI to complete a personal reflection assignment on meditation, leaving the AI prompt visible in the submission.
According to Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California at San Diego, oral assessments are "definitely experiencing a renaissance," offering the added benefit of practicing a valuable career skill, with the trend transcending disciplines and class sizes—including a 600-student undergraduate business class at Canada's University of Western Ontario.
Until the 18th century, oral exams remained the default mode of assessment at Oxford and Cambridge universities, and in some countries such as Norway and Denmark they never went away, according to Stephen Dobson, a professor and university administrator in Norway who wrote a book about oral exams.
Clay Shirky, New York University's vice provost for AI and technology in education, advocated in a New York Times op-ed for colleges to revive medieval educational practices by moving away from take-home assignments toward in-class blue book essays, oral examinations, required office hours, and real-time knowledge demonstrations, noting that AI detection tools produce too many false positives to be reliable.
