| 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. |
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| ▲ | fabian2k 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | hx8 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > would be impossible to scale 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. | | |
| ▲ | B-Con 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | hx8 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I actually think of degree mills as being vertically scaled. Online courses, a lot of course work graded by computers, large classrooms, etc. As for the quality, I think small classrooms with good teachers probably produces a better outcome than large classrooms with great teachers. |
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| ▲ | dfdydx 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One big difference I observed between the US and $HOMECOUNTRY is that US colleges require a lot of courses with little credit, so a normal college year is N courses x K credits per courses, N large, K small. In $HOMECOUNTRY it is typically N small, K large - think instead of having Calc IV, Trig whatever, Algebra 2 and Introduction to Proofs, you have a single "Mathematics" course that last a whole year, not just a semester. Since each course needs its eval, assessment is a function of N, not N*K or K. Much easier to scale if there is ~5 evals per student per year than ~20. | |
| ▲ | bonoboTP 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | Almondsetat 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What is the point of this reply? GP already specified oral exams are mostly reserved to courses with smaller numbers |
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