Reconsidering the Use of Oral Exams and Assessments: An Old Way to Move Into a New Future

Synthesis: Fenton (2025) makes the case that oral exams and assessments deserve renewed attention as an authentic assessment strategy in the face of generative AI. Arguing that the real-time, interactive nature of an oral assessment prevents students from using AI to generate and memorize answers, the article reviews the history, types, benefits, challenges, and practical recommendations for oral assessments across high school and higher education. Key benefits include personalization, authenticity, work-readiness, deeper knowledge, and the preservation of Academic Integrity; key challenges include scheduling, anxiety, and potential bias.

Key Findings

Oral assessments reduce AI-related academic integrity issues because the real-time, interactive format prevents students from using AI to generate answers and memorize them ahead of time, particularly when questions are unknown in advance (drawing on Nikolic et al., 2023).
Oral assessments are authentic — they mirror professional practice (job interviews, workplace challenges, clinical/patient communication), build communication skills, confidence, and deeper understanding, and prepare students for careers where verbal communication is vital.
They probe depth over memorization: as a dialogue, oral assessments let educators test comprehension, critical thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning — reaching the highest levels of Bloom's taxonomy — rather than rote recall.
Benefits include personalization, authenticity, work-readiness, deeper knowledge, enjoyment, and higher grades; oral assessments can also support struggling students and shift study habits away from memorization toward understanding.
Challenges include scheduling/technical logistics, student anxiety, and potential bias (gender, ethnicity, language, speed of answering, and non-anonymous marking), though evidence suggests oral assessments can be as inclusive as written exams (e.g., accommodating dyslexia).

Study Design & Method

This is a review/essay (not an empirical study) in Educational Researcher. Fenton synthesizes the literature on oral exams and assessments, covering their history (from ancient Greek/Socratic practices through the "viva voce" tradition at Oxford and Cambridge), Joughin's (1998) typology of oral assessments (six dimensions: primary content type, interaction, authenticity, structure, examiners, orality), and evidence from disciplines including business, medicine, engineering, marketing, chemistry, and biology. The article distills benefits and challenges from the research and offers practical design considerations and 13 numbered recommendations for implementation.

Implications for AI in Education

In an era of generative AI that performs well at the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy but struggles at the create level and with theory-based arguments, Fenton positions oral assessment as a way to assess the higher-order skills students actually need. For reducing AI misuse and preserving Academic Integrity, oral assessments offer a low-tech, human-centered complement to AI-detection tools. The article connects to Authentic Assessment, Assessment, Feedback (via guiding principles for prompting), Critical Thinking, Formative Assessment, and the policy questions around assessment redesign. Its practical recommendations — clear rubrics, standardized content, assessor training, prompting guidance, bias mitigation, and online delivery options — give educators a concrete playbook for reintroducing oral assessment.

Limitations

As a review/essay, it does not provide new empirical evidence. The author notes that more research is needed on how students and educators actually experience oral assessments in the current AI environment, and on more practical implementation guidance. It is published in a major research journal (Educational Researcher) but represents a position/review piece rather than original data.

Connected Concepts

Connected Articles

Ssaho AI Academic Integrity Review 2025 — AI and Academic Integrity review
Socratic Tests Conversational Assessment — Socratic tests / conversational assessment
Multimodal Embodied Cognition Oral Explanations 2026 — Multimodal embodied cognition and oral explanations

Citation

Fenton, A. (2025). Reconsidering the use of oral exams and assessments: An old way to move into a new future. Educational Researcher, 54(7), 430–436.