Educators and students alike value authentic assessments that have a strong connection to their future professional life. Organizations and workforce assessments continue to identify the need for graduates to develop their critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and students have responded positively to courses that assist them to develop such skills (CallaghanKoru & Aqil, 2022). In the past, case studies and presentations have often been used to develop and assess these higher order skills; however, both of these have limitations around students “thinking on their feet.” Because oral assessments mirror a wide range of professional experiences in which students must communicate with peers, colleagues, or patients, they are both authentic and valuable to a student’s future development and career. Often, it is only when students enter their profession that they are able to reflect back on the value of oral assessments as useful preparation for the reality of professional practice (Henderson et al., 2002).

Preparation is key to successful implementation of oral examinations. The structure of the assessment can take the form of a presentation, questioning or interrogation, and application (Akimov & Malin, 2020) or problem solving. While the construction of oral exam questions is often discipline-specific, there are some helpful general guidelines. Oral exams are well suited to case-based or scenario-driven questions (Fitzgerald, 2016). There should be a clear connection between the question and class discussions and readings, so that students can demonstrate that connection. For shorter assessments, such as oral quizzes, Dumbaugh (2020) limits questions to one topic. Ohmann (2019) recommends three types of question designs: free-form discussion based on conversation prompts, demonstration or discussion of an example, and the “why” question in which students demonstrate their reasoning skills in defending a position, argument, or fact.

For the oral exam, students often reported that it was less scary than initially feared. One wrote, “Altogether, I felt like the oral exam went very well. The preparation was much more stressful than the actual test, and it was a great break from the endless paper-writing for other history and religion classes I have taken. During the oral exam, my stress melted away when I started just talking about what I learned over the course of the semester. It was great to have another human engaging with what I was saying and asking questions as I answered to see what I learned. This was my favorite part of the oral exam and I hope to be able to take more tests like this.” Multiple students also described the experience of preparing for the oral exam as helping them understand the material better.

From the teacher’s perspective, oral exams provide quick but precise feedback about the students’ knowledge. Lang finds it helpful to use oral exams earlier in the term, as she can use what she learns from her students to adapt the class to their needs. Additionally, Lang noticed one unexpected benefit, as oral exams in large online classes helped her build a relationship with her students. “The oral exam gave me some one-on-one time with each student. A few students who were struggling felt more comfortable and reached out to me right after or during this exam meeting.”

TAs also noted that the oral examination improved conceptual understanding. “I think it was a really useful exercise for students, and also spoke to the concept-learning focused pedagogy of the Professor.” A different TA adds, “I think the benefit of an oral midterm is found in its ability to encourage creative thinking and synthesis in a conversational format.” TA feedback reveals that the oral examination emphasizes students’ ability to comprehend and explain course concepts. “For example, there were situations in which it was clear that students had tried to simply ‘memorize’ the right answers, but I could tell that they did not fully grasp the material (indicated either by their inability to elaborate further or by the fact that they were getting certain basic terms/concepts mixed up).”

Authenticity over artificial constraints. In professional technical work, people code with access to documentation, online resources, and increasingly, AI tools. They collaborate with colleagues, search for solutions to error messages, and reference examples from past projects. Creating exam conditions that strip away all these supports— locked-down browsers, banned tools, isolated workspaces—may produce valid measurements of what students can do in those constrained circumstances, but it tells us little about their readiness for the actual work of computing. The conversational exam takes a different approach. Students work in their familiar environment, a cloud-based Jupyter notebook, with documentation and course materials at hand, and connected to the open Internet. They may even use AI, though under supervision and with clear boundaries about what constitutes appropriate use. The assessment focuses on what they can do and explain in real time, with the time constraint being perhaps the one “exam condition” that deviates from work scenarios.

For the fluid mechanical dissection, student teams spent the final three weeks of class dissecting a piece of equipment, such as a carburetor or a hedge trimmer, identifying how it works and what fluid-mechanical decisions were made in its design. After analyzing the system performance, teams described what they did in a five-minute video for a technical audience. Students were expected to use technical terminology correctly, select and justify engineering models, and identify the fundamental fluid machines that were used in the device. They were also expected to collaborate as a team, share the work, and hopefully enjoy the process of taking apart a machine to understand how it works.