This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's very apparent to both student and teachers how well a topic is understood. Marks are rarely contested and in my experience most students think the process is fair.
Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....
I studied my masters in Denmark 5 years ago, before AI. This was absolutely the case - first oral exams in my batchelors many of my fellow students were incredibly nervous. By the end the exam atmosphere was very chill. I definitely improved with public speaking, and so did the other students - including some who had been almost incapacitatingly anxious (throwing up, requiring a lot of convincing from us to even attend exams) and ended roughly the same as the rest of us
That's part of what fixed it for me. What really fixed it was three things:
1. Actually being very knowledgeable about the subject in question, to the extent that I can offer facts or well-reasoned opinion on the topic on essentially any reasonable question. In other words, not being a junior high school student asked to do a 15 minute speech on a topic drawn from a hat.
2. Not having the idea that the audience expects a correct and immediate answer to every possible question.
3. Not doing every single speech literally in front of 15% of my entire peer group, including all my friends, all the people I admired, and all the people who treated me poorly.
I still hate doing Zoom calls without slides or a screen to share because I can't stand having 20 people staring intently at me. It's just distracting. But otherwise I have no problem at all talking for hours on a topic I know well.
Yes, yes, yes. Thank you for posting this. It drives me absolutely freaking crazy when people do the "Oh, I'm just not _____," having essentially decided they are not _____, and therefore will never learn or change.
Like every time I hear "Oh I'm just not a math person." It's not that I expect everyone to like math because I do, not at all. But I do expect people to not artificially limit themselves. :/
I have always disliked public speaking and oral defense since I was a child, to the point of fairly profound anxiety. But please withhold you woe—these people are, as I am today, adults. Masters students. Coddling them and holding low expectations has proven to be a sort of “killing them with kindness” approach to handling modern youth. People need to be encouraged (and required) to do things they don’t like to become proper functioning adults. I didnt like it, and I still don’t, as it the case with most everyone. But we all grow from it.
"Woe" is also sometimes used to tell someone to just suck it up and deal with it. In those cases it is a way to make fun of someone for being too sensitive or complaining too much.
sure, but what I was pointing out here is that "woe betide you" is a specific idiomatic phrase. it's usually used as a threat, i.e. "woe betide you if you do that".
I didn't see it as a threat here at all. I think it was just pointing out an underserved part of the population when it comes to this. And I think "withhold your woe" was meant to say that getting out of your comfort zone can be beneficial sometimes (or in other words, that it's not necessarily actually underserving).
I think we're talking past each other here :) I wasn't speaking of whether it was a good or a bad thing, I was just pointing out that "woe" meaning "a misfortune or calamity" is the only meaning of the word that applies to the phrase "woe betide", the more common meaning of woe meaning grief or sorrow doesn't apply here because it's an idiom, not two separate words.
I was pointing it out because the first comment I was replying to was clearly unpacking the word "woe" from the phrase "woe betide" and I figured they would appreciate the linguistic footnote.
If you aren't capable of this, in most careers you won't be able to use your degree anyway. The only other even marginally acceptable compromise is something like the essay portions of what used to be sit down tests with only pen and paper, but longform and supervised closely.
(Note I say this because optimally, this encourages less "supervisory" desires by others later in one's career. If your peers and overseers get out of your way, maybe you will relax more and not feel so anxious all the time. Sorry for the second comment not an edit, testing new HN clients.)
Classic “get over it” condescension. Some people are unable to control their strong physiological reaction to in-person judgement. Go tell professional orchestra players who rely on propranolol to control their stage fright to just grow up and start becoming a “proper functioning adult.”
Good luck working in the real world if you can't handle interpersonal interactions or being judged. The coddling has to stop. It's doing no one any good.
Clarification for non-Danes: this post is not entirely accurate. Not all Master's courses in Denmark have oral examinations, and many courses before the Master's level (including elementary school) have oral exams. It is unrelated to the academic level, and instead related to the academic discipline and the size of the course. The latter is in my experience the main constraint, as oral exams are difficult to scale. They usually take 20-30 minutes per student, and if you have a course with 200 students, well, you're in for a long time.
The oral exam format described is also somewhat unusual, in my experience. It is usually the case that there is one internal examiner and one external examiner in the room. More than that would be ruinously expensive. The format varies; usually it's a combination of a short presentation and questions asked by the examiner. Drawing a random topic is very common.
Source: I am a university teacher in Denmark who teaches master-level courses without oral exams, and I have been an examiner for many oral exams at university level.
> Of course, woe betide those with social phobias...
The professors at my grad school had a very amazing tact to get through this as well. They had enough time for specific students who they knew struggled with such issues during the mid semester orals and then had an amazing way of getting answers from them even in the discomfort.
It is amazing how much can be done with soft talking, slow progression and pauses in between from professors who care.
64 year old nerd with social phobias here. When I was in school, I had to practice oral knowledge tests since grade one. I had my first oral exam in grade six (math) and 2-3 oral exams every year since then. If I hadn't had that experience, I would never have gotten into university. I still don't like verbal communications with people (especially in a tense situations like exam), I'm slow etc, but it's manageable because I had to practice it a lot. I don't think I would have survived in modern "the environment must be made suitable for everyone" school/university.
I’m a generation younger but I concur. I hated presenting and my anxiety was crippling. But the solution for that is to practice more, not to avoid it.
100% and I think this is echoed across the thread.
It does apply to many many things that are uncomfortable/hard.
You somehow have to power through the part where you suck a lot and don’t worry about it.
Mastering that is a huge advantage in life
I have some anxiety about public speaking or presenting to a group. Not debilitating but more than normal, or so I feel. But I find that once I get going it fades. Starting off is the peak of stress. So if the examiners are trained how to encourage a person to start talking, perhaps with some introductory conversation, and when questioning not being confrontational, that might help. The goal is to find out what they know, not how polished their presentation or debating skills are.
Would it help to be interviewed in a room where there is no other person, and you can be seen through a camera and communicate through magnetic speakers?
>>> Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....
True but maybe a blessing in disguise. As a shy college kid once (although not with any real disability), being forced to get up in front of people helped me get over it. And I was 10x better after a semester of teaching during a break in my career.
So, I grew up in the former Soviet Union. Starting with ninth grade entrance entrance and exit exams were like that. I remember I had to take university physics exam just to be able to qualify for a consideration. It was fairly rough, but I think in a way, good system because it sifted out the wannabes early on.
Yes, I did Physics, Geometry infront of the committee to explain my answer. Language course was written under a dictation, one mistake would cost you a point out of 5. So you had to be flawless on everything, spelling, punctuation, structure, etc. I aced my physics and language, but got a C (3) in geometry, I fumbled on one question.
Same. The focus on written exams rated blindly and uniformly at the US higher education system always puzzled me. I guess that's the only way to scale things up when you pay professors and teachers living wages?
> We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance)
This is also an absolutely great way to ensure the participants really understand what they’re saying, even aside from ai-related concerns. You could always pull definitions straight from textbooks, and write something which mostly makes sense but that you don’t really understand. But you really can’t teach something unless you do understand it, imo. The best command I ever got on a topic was due to TA’ing
This happened to me back in the 1990s when I was assigned presenting Boltzmann machine to the class. I read up on it naturally, could explain each step in isolation but couldn't still quite internalize how it all came together. But as I was presenting it, all suddenly clicked into place. It was remarkable transition from loosely connected foggy concepts to instant clarity which made me break mid sentence. Once re-composed I couldn't help but notice that the manner of my presentation has changed.
The professor (strict uncompromising man hated by most of the class) then remarked, "now I see you really figured it out".
This is not general to all subjects in Danish universities. I studied physics in Denmark and while the majority of my exams after the second year match this description (though not all), my impression is that this is not at all the norm. Students in the humanities in my dorm, for example, seemed to have an overwhelming majority of several-day take-home written exams (with no associated oral defense).
I expect a lot of the social anxiety can be mitigated by arranging things so that students get a chance to know the examiners and build a rapport with them ahead of time. (E.g., if they’re an instructor then make sure they have office hours and encourage students to go.) I’ve got my mental health challenges but that’s how things worked in my grad school and I got by just fine.
> I expect a lot of the social anxiety can be mitigated by arranging things so that students get a chance to know the examiners and build a rapport with them ahead of time.
That's not my experience. Standing in front of somebody who's been your teacher and you might look up to is way scarier than some rando.
That's how my school did it even for high school courses. End of the year exams were infront of the committee. Same thing, you pull a ticket and have few minutes to prepare the answer. I aced physics course, that was a proud moment but credits didnt transfer when we moved overseas...
that's interesting, i do something similar when helping my 16 year old with his homework. I ask him to teach me the topic first (it's been a while since i took physics and calc hah). By the time he's able to answer my questions so that i can help him then he's answered his own questions pretty much.
I do this at work too. When doing code review i actually do mostly listening and then some questions. If the developer can teach me the code and i understand what they're doing and why then it's usually pretty good code already.
This is also the case for many graduate programs in the US as well, but what this article is suggesting is that there are now specific oral exams to defend a student's paper, not just general oral exams.
I can see this being a problem in the US when it comes to "accommodations" in general. Students with an ADHD diagnosis can claim it causes just about any difficulty and get accommodations for it. The local (top ranked, but everyone's seen all the stories coming out of the Ivies...) college here gives students with ADHD double time on exams and has them take it in a special disabilities proctoring center where it's a struggle to get the staff there to even enforce those time limits. Obviously this also makes it infinitely easier to outright cheat as well.
Not a chance you will get past the "my ADHD makes it hard for me to think about these things verbally" challenge at institutions like this.
as someone with ADHD who always finished exams first or was the designated spokesperson for group presentations...
I have no idea why you'd want to be taking a test a second longer than you already have to.
Either you know the material or you don't, anything taking a lot of time is borderline stuff where you're scrapping for points you might not deserve in the first place lol
> I have no idea why you'd want to be taking a test a second longer than you already have to.
The theory was that ADHD students have trouble sustaining concentration, so extra time allows for thought breaks and distractions. The idea was that 2 hours for the ADHD student would be similar to 1 hour of concentration for a non-ADHD student, and therefore the inequity had been partially compensated.
The teachers I know have the same observation that you do: The extra test time isn’t usually used by the ADHD students, but when other students (or maybe more accurately, parents) discover that extra test time was available, most of the high performing students suddenly got diagnosed with ADHD at the same time. They were the ones staying extra long to proofread their work.
For the elementary/junior high teachers I know the schools’ solution was to give everyone the same extended test taking time. Easiest way to remove the incentive to seek out a fake diagnosis without taking anything away from anyone.
Absolutely not saying this is even the most common case but: people “without ADHD” but with a diagnosis can use the extra time effectively.
It is most clear when there is some kind of problem solving involved. An extra 30 min to figure out the trick or plan a detailed approach is a real benefit.
The other case is where there’s some missing knowledge but with a bunch of extra effort you can figure out how to do it. That would be something like re-constructing a self-balancing binary tree from some half-remembered lecture notes.
ADHD is known to be able to affect speed and consistency of output, even of mastered material, and in a variety of ways -- hence "I have no idea..."
Standard diagnostic questionnaires commonly reference this. The last part of your comment reflects a lack of understanding of both human cognition and recall and ADHD in particular.
Oh, at least in the post Soviet tradition of oral exams, you are given plenty of time to think and prepare your argument before you start an actual conversation with the examining professor. And if you need to think more during the exam to answer a tricky question, the professor just shifts to talk to another student who is ready to present their case for the time being. So it is less of a public speaking and more of a conversation where you can take a pause to think through an argument, or a proof, or a problem.
European universities also have accommodations and extra time etc. And yes it's an arms race. Though at some point it will simply inflate away the value of the degree, but educators will stand there baffled, not understanding how it could happen.
This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments.
But what it does threaten to do is effectively abandon all the efficiencies of the written word.
When higher education evolved into a mass system in the 1800s and into the 1900s, pure oral examination was looked at as super inefficient. A written paper could be handed in and graded without lining everyone up in front of a panel.
The oral system scales poorly. One examiner can only hear so many students in a day. There are damn good reasons Medieval universities were small and modern ones are not.
Requiring every major paper to be defended live reintroduces the bottleneck that written exams were designed to escape.
Accessibility takes a hit too. Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective? This does not seem very logical, or sensitive.
So while it’s nice that academics are rediscovering the old ways, I don’t really see this as a scalable answer to raising education levels for the masses, but more of a knee jerk way to try to bypass the obvious technological disruption by returning to non-scalable, inaccessible ways of doing things that our ancestors abandoned for a reason.
It has its place for graduate students and smaller volume education systems. It’s fine for keeping the ivory tower clean. But it’s not the answer to expanding education to everyone and taking advantage of the technological disruption to advance education and learning throughout greater humanity, which is what AI definitely possesses as a possibility.
This is basically my thought- my school is considering all sorts of things to combat AI cheating, and most of them scale poorly. You can implement them and increase your reputation, but your tuition will have to increase to pay for a lower student/teacher ratio.
So we’re probably going to see a split- mass production schools that still act as job training for Industrial Revolution era jobs will keep doing what they are doing. Schools that want to keep their academic prestige will implement these inefficient safeguards and raise prices accordingly. Employers will distinguish between these two types of diplomas when there are enough options out there that are combatting cheating- much like in-person schools are generally valued higher than online educations, or how certain schools (MIT, Stanford) are valued higher then others. This might lead us to the transformation of higher education many have been anticipating, because the current system cannot remain as-is. We all thought technology was the thing causing the upheaval but AI has really accelerated things.
Oral exams are still common in Germany and many European countries in case of smaller courses taken by 20-30 students in a semester, and sometimes even in larger courses, and the task of examining is then split among multiple professors and lecturers.
In Hungary it's a pipeline. You go in a room, you pick a piece of paper out of a hat, which gives you some task or topic to prepare for. Then you sit down at a desk (the room is filled with about 15 students working already), then you solve the problem or sketch out your notes to present the topic you picked for like 20 minutes, then you go to the professor and you have to, in low voice, explain your solution, the professor asks back and pokes at it to make sure you understand. The professor then gives a grade immediately and you go home.
In Germany, it's usually no random pick of a topic, you just go through the entire semester's material over 30-45 minutes and the professor stops to spend more or less time on each topic to explore your knowledge. You can explain things by making sketches on paper. A PhD student sits there quietly taking notes of what was asked and what the student answers approximately. You leave the room, the prof and the PhD student discuss the performance, decide the grade and you come back, and the professor explains the grade and what you did well and not well.
I'm not familiar with the German universiry system, but I think a 1 hour, 2 professors (or one professor and one PhD student) would be impossible to scale. A class of about 100 students could take an entire month! (or better, 2-months of professor-hours!)
But that is how certain exams are done right now. Though it's usually 30 minutes including overhead. It's not something you can do in classes with multiple hundred students, but it's certainly done at scale.
I was the PhD student in the room in dozens of these exams, and I toke some of them myself. But that was for classes with a bit less than 40 to maybe 60-80 students. The load for the larger ones was shared among professors, if I remember correctly. But it was certainly the case that a single professor spent 1-2 days doing nothing else but these exams.
And it was 1 professor and 1 PhD students, and those don't count. They essentially grow on trees and are always available, if you need some.
I think education is something better scaled horizontally than vertically. More schools, with more professors instead increasing the student per professor throughput. The classes where I learned the absolute most, and had the best experience, were closer in size to 25 than 100.
The US has proved it can do horizontal scaling, as the majority of adults gets a college degree.
The horizontal capacity is ineffectively used by having many degree mills and low-value degrees, but if we re-tooled the knowledge sets we could raise the bar.
At low student counts, like 20, (think specialist niche elective master's courses, not the huge bachelor's courses) it's perceived by profs as more efficient in fact than the ordeal of organizing a written exam.
With an oral exam, the prof blocks off 3 days or so, with ~8 students per day and it's done. It's not a huge additional effort compared to all the effort of giving the course over the full semester anyway.
An added, though minor benefit is that the professor might decide to offer a student assistant job to someone who performs well, because it's much easier to judge who is actually good in an oral exam vs in written. There's a reason that job interviews aren't just tests filled out on paper but involve personal interactions.
I think you have the right observation but the wrong conclusion.
The appeal of digital systems, at a social level, is that they can transmit information accurately for almost no marginal cost. They come at the risk of fraud.
With AI the levels of risk have increased. Anyone can now be a fraudster, and it gets harder and harder to prove anything online. Either of us two, in this conversation, could be a well tuned LLM.
So society, collectively and at an individual level, is forced to reassess reliance on purely digital information. Which means that the advances in the technology, actually end up reducing the utility of digital systems more generally.
You can argue that this makes education costly and less accessible. It does. It absolutely does. There is also no alternative except to see higher education get wiped out, which would have devastating economic and social effects.
"So we are going back to blue books..." exactly. And, it is also efficient. You just need a proctor to ID the test taker and make sure they aren't using AI to cheat in order to verify that the student learned something which seems like a good idea.
Oral exams can also compensate a lot for different types of exam anxiety. Blanking on individual points doesn't matter as much, the examiner will help you along or ask along a different path. Doesn't help for someone that completely shuts down, but it's much easier to determine if a student was just stuck on some minor point and actually knows the topic in an oral exam.
They are likely prone to more biases than written exams, and the variability among examiners is likely high. My experience is both in taking these exams myself, and also sitting in on them as the note taker many times. Though that was only with one specific professor, and almost always on the same course. But that was in my experience a very fair exam, even for those students that were very noticeably nervous.
I graduated in 2000 and remember doing the oral defence. It wasn't a huge deal. You already have a personal relationship with your tutors and they are familiar with you and your communication style. They are not the Gestapo.
I don't think the world really works like that. Hearing an elevator pitch has a very different impact from reading a short-form business proposal. And of course the efficiency of the written word is not absolute; in lively discussions and debates, there is no time to put thoughts down into the written word; they had to be uttered. I am personally of the opinion that a successful university graduate should not only be able to write down their ideas in words but also be able to speak to defend their ideas.
It’s a good answer for keeping online education honest. It doesn’t need to be applied to all in-person schools, where teachers distribute spot checks across the course relatively evenly, but it makes perfect sense in conjunction with online testing. You only have to challenge one essay per student per term to catch cheaters with a near-perfect success rate. Assuming a 12 week course with 36 students, that’s qty.3-4 of teacher:student one on one meetings per week for the term; I think that’s doable. If you’ve oversold your teachers and have more than 36 students per, guess you’ll have to increase your labor expenses :D
It shouldn't take long for educators suss out whether students know the subject they are talking about. You don't have to question them exhaustively to determine that they likely did or didn't do the work they are claiming. TFA is about high school projects, not PhD defenses.
"The oral system scales poorly. One examiner can only hear so many students in a day."
I'm not joking: you could have an AI quiz the students and test their understanding. That way the tests go deeper into testing the understanding by following through on the answers, and are standardized and fair for everyone. I don't think we are there yet at all but I actually think its not insane for the future. I expect downvotes though/I don't think our generation would agree with this.
Universities in the US charge fortunes and pay instructors a pittance while plowing ever more money into “administrators”. Fire half the administrators and hire more instructors to both proctor exams and give more personalized instruction.
> Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective?
Universities are entirely elective, why would they need to cater specifically to disabilities? Driving schools don't make exceptions for the blind. There are skills that people expect you to have with a certain kind of diploma, and it reflects poorly on the school if they don't have a standard to hold people to. Not being able to present your work in a basic way is one of those mandatory skills that imo makes you unqualified to graduate if you don't grasp it.
I'm not saying you can't make an exception for a person or two who is clearly as good or better than the rest otherwise, but people will always try to misuse as many exceptions as they can, en masse, as an excuse to just avoid doing required work.
I feel this was already a severe problem pre-AI. From what I hear from my partner (in university administration), nearly half the students demand accomodations for disabilities. Many of those conditions are very difficult to falsify
It doesn't feel good, but at some point we have to ask, can we support every single case, at the expense of the whole? I'd like to be convinced that's not a necessary tradeoff
I don't think it's that bad yet, but it's certainly on its way there. We're like at this intersection of lots of conditions that previously weren't documented becoming actual diagnoses, that pulling along a lot of peer-pressure kind of trendiness to have some kind of fault that makes you more unique, and the practicality of a system that was designed to give massive benefits to rare exceptions, for which now so many easily qualify on paper.
The list of conditions that qualify for what will most likely have to be redone completely from scratch.
But even with the written exam, wouldn't the bottleneck still be there where the professors still need to read through all the papers? I guess its definitely more efficient and asynchronous, but I can't imagine by much assuming the same and equal rigor is applied.
As an educator myself, this quarter for the first time for my course's final project, I've switched to actually asking my students to provide an "AI Authenticity Audit" of their (project-relevant) chats in the construction of said projects. All my students' output over the last two years went from pre-AI level quality to boardroom-ready polish, and I'm actually more interested to see how they arrive at an outcome rather than the final output itself - focusing on their questioning, curating, editing, and iterating process. Didn't think we'd get to somewhere like this so soon, but here we are. Strange, but I'm trying it out.
IMO this kind of thing adds work and stress for the best students. If I'd been faced with something like this while I was in school I would have felt the need to basically curate a parallel construction AI discussion, knowing it would be judged. I understand the theory that, in the age of AI, the prompts are more interesting than the outputs, but I'm not convinced this is the way.
Things like the Denmark approach (and/or in-person written responses) seem like a better direction. Treat take-home writing the same as we've treated take-home math questions - as useful practice (for those who choose to actually engage with it), but not a significant input to grading.
Yes, I thought about that, and which is why I'm just running this as a pilot for this quarter to see how it goes and I'm not particularly attached to it if feedback/results are mixed. But that said, there are real constraints on my ability to supervise students with in-person examination, but that is more a problem with how my society funds and cares about education. We are forced to take approaches that 'work at scale', hence experiments like this. But truly, reception was positive when this was introduced, because students too want to be held to a good standard and don't want others to get credit for not doing the work toward achieving the learning outcomes like the most honest ones.
Oral Defences have a long established tradition in Denmark, but recently there’s been real cut back on this as a money saving exercise. So both teachers and Students are familiar with this form of examination.
So for a dane this reads like “back to the old way”, rather than anything new or novel.
Millions of students are now donating to neuralink so they can have stealth LLM answers on the fly. Teachers will have to count the number of load bearing per paragraph.
I had to do an oral defense of my thesis in graduate school. When you've spent months and months writing something extremely obscure... well, I'd hope that it's not that difficult.
A fun anecdote from my defense was that this element of logic "did not exist before some time" or something.
One of my citations was a book from like, the 1700's or something, and it absolutely blew away one of the committee members that I'd found it. He asked me "how on earth did you find this reference?" and I just told him that I look at all the math/logic libraries in Boston I had access to, I looked up all their logic books that predated the cut off I was looking for, and I skimmed them.
I didn't even have to leave my university's library, because one of the first five books had the counter-factual I was looking for. Sure, it was a rare book and I had read it in a special room, but it wasn't particularly hard to find.
Before that defense, I was 100% the only person alive with that information.
I'm teaching a university math course next semester and I've been messing around with a solution to this that my old analysis professor used to employ. Every week, they take home a handful of theory questions. These aren't turned in for credit. But, every week, there'll be a short quiz where one of those questions are asked verbatim, along with a small follow up.
That felt like a very natural solution to me. Of course, worst case scenario, they just blindly generate and memorize the proofs without thinking. But I think the follow ups will catch them in that case. Moreover, I choose to believe that >90% of my students are willing to at least put in the work of scrutinizing those proofs which is honestly not bad exercise in its own right.
I would love to do oral exams directly, the logistics with the number of students I have just make that hard. I know we're trialing it with the less populated special topics courses.
This is how we used to grade labs when I was a TA in college. Students worked in groups of two and showed up with a working project to get graded. Afterwards, we'd ask the two students questions and it was extremely obvious if one or both of them didn't work on it.
I wish we were doing this in the US even before AI was an issue. I suspect it would reorient students to their work in some pretty cool ways. I mean, it might feel like torture for some and maybe that’s not so much a bad thing. I’m sure I’m not thinking of some downsides to this too, but it seems like such a great counter against “factory” schooling. Of course, this could be a lot more work for faculty and could be hard to keep up with a huge student population. Again, maybe a feature more than a bug.
In my high school English class (like 10 years ago) my teacher assigned readings and called on a random person each day to give an overview of a section. He basically quizzed you in front of the class on themes, plots, etc. It was very effective at getting me to read and care for that class, because if you just sat up there and didn't know anything you'd lose marks on participation (and look kind of dumb). Not sure if/when/why oral presentations and public speaking are no longer got prioritized.
It feels like systems like the Maturita' final multi-day exam in Italy do a pretty good job at providing students with a standardized, state-supervised process for demonstrating one's competence by the end of high school. No computers, you're under the watchful eye of your teachers the whole time, nobody knows what's going to be on the exam until the day of.
This is a great strategy. It is something I do in code reviews as a senior developer. There has been observed longer code reviews for seniors and this kind of approach keeps it manageable.
This just feels like good educational practice too? I remember really enjoying TA'ing as an undergrad for courses I took the previous year, because THAT'S when I felt I _really_ learned the material.
Likewise, when I was a lab consultant, I felt like advising others was when the concepts of Linux/systems administration _really_ sunk in.
I always crammed the bare minimum for any kind of assessment (by the end of college I was actively avoiding any classes with final exams), but when I need to be able to teach someone else or explain my understanding in a live environment? That's when I _actually_ learn.
It was already long-standing practice, when I was teaching many many years ago, to interview suspected cheaters (it's usually quite obvious) to see if they actually knew what they claimed they knew.
I mean, this is pretty much the easiest way of handling the problem.
When I was teaching in a university the easiest thing to test someone's understanding was a simple question: "Explain me how would you use this in a day-to-day situation."
If the guy knows his business, he'll go on a long lecture obsessing over every new feature of C# 2.0 or PHP 3. He would give you all the differences between Firefox 3.5.1 and IE 6 with Maxthon. (Goddamn I'm freaking old)
Should you not find a spark of interest but just random mumbo-jumbo of words that don't constitute sentences, you can clearly see that there is no understanding present in the subject.
In this case you work as a teacher, helping the guy to figure out what he does not understand in a subject and simplifying things for him till this clicks. After that he will be able to talk about said subject for hours with gusto.
maybe the policy will succeed in encouraging learning for most students (at least I hope so!!); otherwise some might still rely on ai because of the trust they've built up with it, a lack of connection to and therefore faith in the info they're expected to just memorize, low confidence in their abilities, etc
Of course they could, in fact it'll probably be great prep if they read it and understand it instead of just memorising the answer.
If they just memorise the answer any smart teacher can trip them up by just rephrasing things or developing tangents to see understanding.
In school before exams, I'd often make little cheat sheets about things that you'd need to memorise like formulas for areas and volumes or certain physics equations (we weren't allowed any reference material for that on exams). The very act of writing them all down before the exam would often boost my memory enough to the point I'd just recall them.
As a thought experiment:
In-person testing or oral defense approaches work until we get implants. If people have implants, what then? Demand that the implant be turned off? Demand that the implant's data connection be turned off? In the latter case, the person with more storage or a better local model wins.
In the long run, in the AGI world, if everyone has implants, then everyone is roughly equal because computer-aided computation will be better than what any individual can do. Those without implants are screwed.
(I don't want an implant; nor do I want others to have implants.)
Thos whole debate is happening because people think a degree matters. Because getting a piece of paper is more important than knowledge. Students will continue to cheat (AI or not) as long as the goal is to get a stamp.
I find it quite surprising that Danish high school students (the article isn't about university) apparently did write digital exams with internet access until now, so basically open book.
This is great. Sorry, but the Western World has to stop normalizing extreme introvertism. Humans are social. We rely on communication and cooperation to survive. Allowing kids to shelter themselves from interaction and communication during crucial development stages will only hamper them in life.
The more I read about articles like these, I grow even more convinced that the education industry as a whole, regardless of the country or stature, has kind of lost their plot.
Sometimes I even wonder if this is the outcome of sheer laziness, fear or both.
When I speak to professors, teachers and students - It's also surprising that "top tier" institutions are fighting AI harder (outside extremely specific courses like Harvard’s flagship CS50, MBA courses at Wharton (UPenn) and MIT) while "bottom tier" institutions are completely embracing it and rebuilding their curriculum around it. One CS professor at a "bottom tier" CSU mentioned to me that he's actively going completely "open book using AI" - students are allowed to use anything they want from Claude to Codex to OpenCode to finish assignments but the assignments have now changed from "blurt out quicksort" to "let's sort N natural numbers in a cache efficient way using least amount of resources". I would hire the latter over the former anytime. I am tired of interviewing candidates who can shit out quicksort before I can even finish my sentence but stare at me dumbfounded when I ask them to sort people's name serialized in unicode.
In my opinion, the bulk of traditional education has been a mix of memorization of facts, knowing inference rules, and applying inference rules to those facts, coupled with recall.
Before the age of LLMs, only very expensive-to-build rule-based expert systems were able to replicate that functionality. Humans were just simply cheaper and way more reliable.
In 2026, Frontier models are exceedingly, across the board, across industries, breaking records and challenging those notions on cost, capability and sophistication.
Trying to replicate how education used to operate pre-frontier LLMs is like forcing people to farm by hand in the age of automated tractors that have LIDAR, Vision, RTK on board.
I'm not discounting other elements of learning like collaborative debate, clinical/lab work, Socratic reasoning, emotional intelligence and the development of a professional network - but I argue these skills are not limited to a school or university setting. Infact, a lot of this is distorted in a school or university setting compared to the real world.
I have been filing my own taxes, including complexities like equity, real estate and business income for over a decade now, so it's not just a simple 1040 and 540. Reading through IRS documentation, talking to EAs and CPAs to fill in ambiguities and gaps was pretty expensive in terms of time and money.
Both Claude Opus and GPT 5.5 now, as of 2026, answer all my tax questions correctly. Those thousands of dollars in time and money I had spent has been replaced by a single $20 subscription. Unless tax codes drastically change every year, that $20 is a one time cost.
If I were to begin my tax journey in 2026, I would never had to spend those dollars: dozens of tax professionals are out of a job - all their education is for nothing.
It's entirely irrelevant whether they passed their exams by carving answers out on granite, taking their exams in a jail cell on an island proctored by Catholic Nuns under the watchful guard of automatic machine guns manned by T-1000s, I just don't need them anymore. For my usecase, these humans and their credentials provide 0 additional value over a one-time $20 expense, no matter how complicated it was for them to get their credential and what complex interpretive dance they had to do to impress the people awarding their grades.
All this "reject AI, do it by hand" is just insanity at worst and laziness at best.
That said, I'm personally unsure what the future of education in the age of tractors is like but removing weeds, planting seeds, watering them, all by hand is certainly not it.
It's my understanding that most countries - developed or developing - are bottlenecked on educating their masses due to lack of qualified teachers.
That's a bandwidth problem. Having those teachers listen to oral arguments from a handful of students is not solving the core bandwidth problem. All these shenanigans is doing a disservice to the public.
Depends on what skills you want the students to have.
In e.g., philosophy, allowing students to write their assessments with the help of LLMs changes the students’ depth of understanding, as well as their ability to synthesize, formalize, and drum up their own arguments and objections.
These are all useful skills, even in a post-LLM world.
> allowing students to write their assessments with the help of LLMs changes the students’ depth of understanding, as well as their ability to synthesize, formalize, and drum up their own arguments and objections
indeed but LLMs improve these capabilities. Let me explain:
Most educators behave as if using an LLM robs the student of their ability to think. That has not and never been my experience.
You can just tell an LLM to debate, find out inconsistencies and issues in your writing, and challenge you, and it will very well do that!
LLMs for me, cheaply replace teachers who can barely be accessed during office hours because they are so busy doing research or overwhelmed with grading coursework.
In a typical educational setup, I might have half an hour at best with a teacher who looks kindly upon me, and at worst, five minutes with a teacher who doesn't like being around me. An LLM has no emotion, but it has knowledge, it has inference rules, and it has the ability to push back, debate, and find out inconsistencies, bugs and gaps in my thinking.
Behavior that is exactly what I need consistently, in a good teacher.
A frontier LLM is a good teacher who doesn't play games, has no emotion, infinite patience and always available for $20/mo.
There are two kinds of engineers in Finland. Some received a more theoretical education at research universities. Most went to more applied institutions that focus more on practical skills. Regardless of what employers say, they generally prefer the theoretical engineers from research universities. Because the higher status of those universities attracts more talented individuals, because theoretical understanding tends to stay valid longer than practical skills, and because it's easier to learn practical skills at work.
The kids who start their studies today are supposed to graduate in 2030, and they will probably retire around 2080. Focusing too much on the skills their early employers might want in the 2030s would be a huge misallocation of resources.
> because theoretical understanding tends to stay valid longer than practical skills, and because it's easier to learn practical skills at work
depends. If you're building a datacenter and need welders to weld two very specific set of metals together, allocating a PhD in metallurgy to do that welding, I argue would be a huge misallocation of resources.
Now your argument seems to be whether the PhD in metallurgy can pivot to doing something else entirely compared to someone who has been narrowly trained to only weld two very specific set of metals together.
If I interpret your take on the matter, your point seems to be that the former is "intellectually superior and more flexible" than the latter.
I dont take that position - I find most humans to be extremely capable. Just because one human was able to grasp the intricacies of metallurgy doesn't necessarily imply they have more capability than someone who didn't.
The fact that employers in Finland can be so very picky says more about the productivity of Finland than the employee's capabilities. At peak productivity, Finland would just not be hiring anyone who could breathe but import labor because there's not enough people in Finland.
> In my opinion, the bulk of traditional education has been a mix of memorization of facts, knowing inference rules, and applying inference rules to those facts, coupled with recall.
These are important skills to develop, even in a world with LLMs.
> All this "reject AI, do it by hand" is just insanity at worst and laziness at best.
If a 3rd grader complained about having to learn multiplication because calculators exist, would you agree with them?
Why do we make kids learn how to do math if they can pull out their phone and open the calculator app? Because learning how to learn is important and there is value in understanding how the answer is produced, even if you have a machine that can produce it for you.
Universities can teach a separate class on how to use LLMs. The existing classes should be focused on teaching their existing subject matter, not becoming an extension of a how-to-LLM class
> Why do we make kids learn how to do math if they can pull out their phone and open the calculator app? Because learning how to learn is important and there is value in understanding how the answer is produced, even if you have a machine that can produce it for you.
I actually appreciate this question very much because this question is extremely pertinent to our discussion. Before I continue my response, I want to turn around and ask you:
1. What's your definition of "learn how to do math"?
i. Would it be sufficient if they proved they understood what addition, subtraction, multiplication and division was? Or do they need to be able to correctly calculate what 4592 * 314 is? What if they could show you using diagrams of squares and rectangles *why* (a + b)** 2 expands to the equation it does but refused to chart out results for various values of a and b?
ii. Would you fail a student who could reliably chart out results for (a + b)** 2 given various values of a and b, but failed to explain that using diagrams of squares and rectangles?
iii. Would you fail a student who could reliably add 1 + 3 or 7 - 5 or 7 * 5 but fail to compute 4592 * 314?
iv. Is a student who could reliably add 1 + 3 or 7 - 5 or 7 * 5 but fail to compute 4592 * 314 at the age of 5 superior or inferior to a student who is capable of doing the same at age 7?
2. If an exam is composed of tables of long division and your score on the test boils down to your ability to how many of those long divisions you can complete in 45 minutes, does the person who scores the highest have a superior understanding of division than the slowest student who suffers from mental fatigue due to an underlying, undiagnoised health condition?
3. When you say "understand how the answer is produced", what level of abstraction is acceptable to be not considered as cheating? Do they need to understand how the calculator physically computes the floating-point math, or is pushing the button enough? If pushing the button is cheating, why isn't using a base-10 shortcut algorithm also cheating? What if the button pusher explained to you precisely how IEEE 754 worked, how a digital calculator works and then refused to do long division citing it was a complete waste of their time and yours? Would you refuse to let them pass the class or fail them unless they yielded to your demands and complied with your specific definition of learning?
Is the math class also doubling as ability to pass compliance and behavioral standards or is it purely a test of mathematical ability?
4. If a student uses an LLM to generate the boilerplate code for a script, but can perfectly explain the architecture, debug the logic, and scale the deployment, have they failed to 'learn how to learn' just because they didn't manually type the syntax?
Educational resources and classroom time is a zero sum game. We cannot afford to educate everyone if they all require 1:1 coaching from a qualified human in a room that has limited space. Time in a day is zero sum as well. Every minute someone spends on doing the 135th long division is a minute they're not spending thinking if solving long division problems is a meaningful differentor in their long term success - whether it's the long division that will make them wealthy, happy and successful or something else entirely?
This is a good move. I teach a summer async remote course that's ending next week, but I'm giving all the students incompletes until they come back to campus and take an in-person exam the first week of classes. All homework is worth a marginal amount, and if they fail the final they fail the class.
I'm not going to spend my effort policing whether they're using AI or not in their class work because it's a losing battle. At the end of the day, they can either demonstrate mastery of the material at an exam or not. It makes the exams higher stakes, but that's where we are.
I hope at least the homework is good prep for the exams, otherwise if its grade value is marginal there's little point from the PoV of a student that just needs to pass the class to take it seriously
I'd never pay to have you as a teacher, I'm sorry. Maybe your move makes a sense for the reputation of your university's degree, but as a student willing to pay to learn remotely, I'd not accept to be treated like children.
Regular graded assignments is the "treated like children" version. The adult treatment is that you can come to class if you want, you can do the assignments if you want, but if not, that's fine too. There is one test at the end, and it's your responsibility to prepare for it as you want. You manage your own time, we offer consultation, lectures, assignments, tutorials etc. but you can reject all of this and learn the material from some other textbook, and as long as you've mastered the material, you'll get a good grade at the exam. This is how German universities work, for the most part.
The problem is the vicious feedback nowadays of online student evaluations of professors. Professors that are rigorous get complaints and low rankings, kids don't sign up for their sections etc. Kids (parents) pay the administration and the administration wants to keep the customer happy. The only real answer are standardized exams (such as licensure exams) which are beyond parent pocketbook capture.
Or like Europe. You don't pay tuition, but if you slack off, and don't progress properly, you only have a limited number of exam retries and limited number of funded semesters. If you fail, you're out, choose another profession. You're not a customer, you're someone who is trying to prove themselves and get certified by experts on their knowledge. The "customer" of the university is whoever will glance at the degree paper and tries to ascertain the skill/knowledge level of the outgoing student. They have to give a good signal there. The reason this doesn't work in the US, is because they want mediocre children of rich parents to be pushed through, because college is a networking and social class-based finishing school, not a place for acquiring knowledge.
(Also, there should be electives, but the rigorous backbone of a degree should be mandatory, so "students won't choose this course" doesn't come up.)
> The reason this doesn't work in the US, is because they want mediocre children of rich parents to be pushed through, because college is a networking and social class-based finishing school, not a place for acquiring knowledge.
Out of curiosity, which US university did you attend? I went to a well-known and highly-regarded public university in California, and they absolutely did not coddle their students. Poor-performing students regularly washed out.
None, but have interacted with American students at European universities and they were very lost without all the coddling and all kinds of support infrastructure and basically getting their life organized by administrators who personally attended to their matters and reminded them a million times about deadlines and so on. They were unprepared for actually having to manage their own studies, read up on rules, find out where to register for something, until when, etc. etc.
That happens when American students first join US universities too. It takes a few weeks for freshmen to get acquainted with the new reality of being completely responsible for handling their affairs and ensuring their success. It’s nothing to slam them about; that’s an artifact of coming from a system that provides more guide rails during primary education and childhood than European children might enjoy.
American colleges give way more support throughout the studies though. In Europe you're literally alone and nobody cares if you miss deadlines or you're failing out. No general consultations, no extra departments and admin bloat. You have to have your shit together.
It really depends on the university. Mine wasn't particularly helpful in this regard. They sent me a form-letter warning by mail once, when my GPA sank too low one quarter (this was before email was ubiquitous). And they did have some counseling resources available, but the resource-to-student ratio was very, very low. I would not call it white-glove service by any means.
Perhaps you also don't have a comprehensive picture as to what is available to students across every university in Europe. Europe, like America, is a big place and, like America, the situation probably varies by institution. As with most things, the answer is probably more nuanced than general observations would make it seem.
Tenure protects professors against students' complaints (often for the better, sometimes for the worse). Also, the administration already knows that students complain about professors who are tough, and don't typically pay heed to those complaints. Parents don't really have recourse either: what are they going to do, send their kid to Podunk State instead?
Yes indeed. College departments are well-known for cutting the ranks of the professors who have proven track records of boosting enrollment in favor of awarding tenure to the professors who can't get butts in seats.
If you only care about the learning, then you could just take the incomplete. You don’t somehow lose the knowledge you gained.
The only cost of an incomplete is it doesn’t help towards a degree, but a degree is just a signaling mechanism. If you want to be able to use their degree to signal something to someone, you will have to jump through their hoops.
As AI eats up the need for half-assed "I googled a few things and wrote something up and then slacked off for five hours" white-collar-paperwork jobs, it's gonna be pretty hard for people not willing or able to demonstrate that they can do anything that couldn't just be fully done with an "agent" instead.
What is your expectation from such a class? What are you hoping to get out of it?
If you merely want a tutor that will help you out navigate a topic you are interested in, with no strings attached, then sure, yes. No need to take exams.
But if the goal is to get a formally recognized degree in some topic, then you will need to accept that there will be oversight over how you understand that topic. Because the institutions granting those degrees need to sign them off. And if they care about their reputation, they would be interested in signing off only on those students, who actually understand the topic.
So there will need to be exams. In the AI era, it is close to impossible to guarantee that a remote exam will accurately evaluate your understanding of a topic. So the exams would need to be carried out in person.
There is nothing children-specific in using such approach. It is merely one of the few still somewhat objective ways to actually test people's understanding of some topic.
You can learn remotely in his class. That's the whole point he is trying to make. Hybrid does not mean fully remote. If you want fully remote take a full remote class.
"The student is the customer" is a stupid metaphor that only caught on because a lot of people would rather just bring in dollars than worry about "are we actually teaching anything?"
Denmark: "You must now verbally defend your essay." Students: sweating nervously "Uh, well, you see... the AI wrote it, but I agree with what it said?"
Part of college is growing as a human, and part of that is social interaction.
For the same reason a lot of universities in Europe require you to take philosophy. It's completely unrelated to C++ or data-structures, but it adds to your acumen as a whole.
Not that different from some universities that require you to be able to swim[0].
Can you explain why? As I understand it, you're supposed to be able to talk about the work in which you already invested the mental energy to write. Writing involves much more "brain work" than speaking, so if you've truly written the work in question, you should be capable of speaking about it -- unless you have some sort of disability, in which case, there are probably alternative avenues.
Yeah as much as I like the idea, I know there will be some brilliant and driven students who would have a hard time with this due to temperament. For me, if I’m excited about something, I can talk for hours. Maybe not so for everyone though. Then again, not all brilliant and driven students test well either, so… pick your poison?
Would it work in Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Utah, Nevada, Iowa, Puerto Rico, Arkensas, Kansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, DC, Vermont or Wyoming?
They all have a lower population than Denmark.
All but six states (CA, TX, FL, NY, PA, IL) have less than double the population of Denmark.
Top US universities actually have higher teacher/student ratios than top EU schools, and I wouldn't be surprised if this pattern holds in general, so it would be easier to do in the US than it is here.
The important variable is the staff/student ratio, not the size of the country. With few students per class, or many teachers, this scales fine. I'm running similar exams for my (UK) Masters modules, but colleagues are reluctant to do it for the enormous compulsory survey courses as there are several hundred students in them (vs up to about 50 in the MA ones).
For a large compulsory survey course, a well written multiple choice test should suffice. If the test is well constructed, teaching to the test should cover exactly the required material and be no impediment.
Could you point out a reason why education, which can be standardized at least to a state scale¹, cannot be standardized to the state scale utilizing oral defenses? Also, can be ≠ is. Not everything is a startup lol
You said it can be fundamentally different, and of course it can. But “it doesn’t scale” isn’t an argument by itself. In many areas, scale actually creates efficiencies. You’d need to explain what specifically about the larger scale makes the Danish approach unworkable in the U.S
Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....
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