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.

> 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.

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.

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.

What is the point of this reply? GP already specified oral exams are mostly reserved to courses with smaller numbers