All my school and college years 1980-1990 all liberal arts and some STEM exams were oral presentations.
You get into the exam room, you randomly pick a card, turn it over, read the topic, sit down for 15 minutes to get your sh*t together and bam! You present to your professor or to a group of professors a comprehensive answer to a quest…
All my school and college years 1980-1990 all liberal arts and some STEM exams were oral presentations.
You get into the exam room, you randomly pick a card, turn it over, read the topic, sit down for 15 minutes to get your sh*t together and bam! You present to your professor or to a group of professors a comprehensive answer to a question and then you answer their questions. Very little room for cheating and a well rounded evaluation of your knowledge and understanding of the subject.
Finding all these multiple choices and fill in the blanks exams in the US universities seemed very strange to me after that.
In the current US academic climate I woud just go to this old world format of oral presentations. But it means getting very personable, which is a skill long lost in the US. And it’s harder to do with the STEM, which relies more on written tests.
My daughter is a PhD student in physical chemistry at UC Berkeley. Her qualifying exam to advance into the PhD level was oral, in front of several professors and a white board. So, it is still happening.
All my school and college years 1980-1990 all liberal arts and some STEM exams were oral presentations.
You get into the exam room, you randomly pick a card, turn it over, read the topic, sit down for 15 minutes to get your sh*t together and bam! You present to your professor or to a group of professors a comprehensive answer to a question and then you answer their questions. Very little room for cheating and a well rounded evaluation of your knowledge and understanding of the subject.
Finding all these multiple choices and fill in the blanks exams in the US universities seemed very strange to me after that.
In the current US academic climate I woud just go to this old world format of oral presentations. But it means getting very personable, which is a skill long lost in the US. And it’s harder to do with the STEM, which relies more on written tests.
My daughter is a PhD student in physical chemistry at UC Berkeley. Her qualifying exam to advance into the PhD level was oral, in front of several professors and a white board. So, it is still happening.
Was there any reviewable record of the Q & A kept and available to the student? How was that made and stored?
No, there wasn’t even such a concept back in the day.