Oral Assessments
At Brandeis, the ability to articulate complex ideas through the spoken word is more than a practical skill; it is a foundational competency central to the Brandeis Core. While oral proficiency has always been a hallmark of a liberal arts education, the recent rise of generative AI has renewed interest in spoken assessment. Whether in asynchronous online environments or traditional face-to-face classrooms, oral exams and presentations offer a robust mechanism for authenticating student learning and deepening engagement.
Yet oral assessment also brings with it a number of potential challenges. As an instructor, you might wonder whether it is feasible to conduct meaningful assessment at scale, as oral exams and presentations seem likely to consume a considerable amount of your already scarce contact hours with your students. You might also be concerned about the equity of oral assessments, lest you unintentionally disadvantage students who, in spite of their solid grasp of the material and interesting ideas, find extemporaneous speaking uncommonly difficult or stressful, come from diverse linguistic backgrounds, and/or have not received much training in oral expression.
Your students, meanwhile, may experience heightened anxiety around the prospect of oral assessment. Some may express concern that oral exams and presentations often are structured as a "one and done" activity with no chance for revision; others—particularly those who have not studied rhetorical techniques that might help them organize their thoughts and express themselves persuasively—may regard oral expression as a mysterious or innate talent, and worry that they are being assessed on something that they do not know how to practice or improve.
Fortunately, there are a number of steps that you can take to counteract these concerns and make oral assessment an effective and feasible addition to your teaching toolkit.
Designing Oral Assessments
Be clear about what you need to assess. One of the limitations of written assessments can also be their strength: that is, because their questions are fixed, they do not allow for spontaneous digressions (what we might call "evaluative drift"). In an oral exam, on the other hand, it is quite possible to become involved in a conversational exchange that, while interesting, does not actually give you the insight you need in order to be able to assess your student’s mastery of the assigned material. It's important, therefore, to have a well-planned rubric in front of you while your students are speaking, cuing you as to when you might need to follow up on your students' answers while reminding you not to wander too far afield from the agreed upon topic(s).
Carnegie Mellon's Eberly Center offers this rubric for oral exams in History as part of its advice for designing oral assessments; you might consider adopting/modifying it when designing your own. For oral presentations, we recommend the American Association of Colleges and Universities' VALUE rubric for oral communication as a good starting place.
Utilize "hybrid" means of assessment. Oral assessment does not need to carry the full weight of a grade. Pairing it with other modalities can provide a more comprehensive view of student competence (and grant students more opportunities to communicate what they know). You may wish, for example, to ask your students to complete a written exam first, and use the result as the basis for an in-depth oral exam or interview about a specific question or argument they developed. This ensures the oral component targets depth of understanding rather than just breadth of recall.
Design for accessibility. Consider offering graduated on-ramps to students who experience extreme anxiety around oral assessment. This might include allowing a student to record a video presentation first, followed by a shorter, live Q&A session, or providing the core prompts 24 hours in advance to allow for mental preparation.
Check for authenticity. Grounding your oral assessments in authentic, professionally-focused scenarios can motivate students by highlighting the real-world relevance of their learning while providing a more accurate measure of their ability to synthesize and apply knowledge. You might consider structuring an oral exam as a role-based conversation (e.g. by assigning your students to role play a meeting between a consultant and a client, or an advocate and a policymaker).
Preparing Your Students
Practice transparency. Clearly communicate the "code" of the exam—exactly what is expected of your students, and how they will be judged—to reduce the feeling of uncertainty students may have about how to succeed. The best way to do this, in most cases, is to create and share clear, detailed rubrics with your students, allowing them to see not only the extent to which their oral communication skills are factored into their grade, but also specifically which aspects of their speaking are valued, and how. You might also ask students to practice evaluating some example presentations with you, so they see how the rubric works in action.
See above for guidance on creating effective rubrics for oral assessments.
Make the time to coach students' speaking skills: Though most students will have been assigned some kind of oral presentation at some point in their pre-Brandeis schooling, it is less likely—with the exception of students with strong theater or debate backgrounds—that they have received much coaching or feedback about how speaking differs from writing, or how to improve the efficacy of their oral communication. Make sure to incorporate some low-stakes speaking practice into your class meetings in advance of any higher-stakes assessments—for example, systematic "cold calling," small group recitations, or weekly check-ins that normalize speaking in class—and that you offer meaningful feedback to students on any aspects of their oral performance that you intend to evaluate.
Lean into peer relationships. There is no need for you to be the sole arbiter of effective communication in your course. By fostering a supportive environment with opportunities for small presentations and peer-to-peer feedback, you can transform students in the audience from passive observers to active collaborators, help students feel supported, increase the volume of feedback they receive, and take some of the onus off of yourself as the instructor to do all of the coaching.
Grading Oral Assessments
Assess with your rubric in hand. If written well, your rubric can double as a helpful guide to structuring your conversations with your students, reminding you to ask appropriate follow up questions and to ask your students to (e.g.) explain their reasoning or make explicit reference to the evidence upon which they are drawing, if those are relevant line items in your rubric.
Give realtime feedback. One of the greatest efficiencies of oral assessment is the immediacy of the feedback loop. Rather than spending hours annotating a stack of papers weeks after the fact, you can provide verbal feedback and a provisional grade shortly after the session ends. (Some experts argue that a 15-minute conversational assessment gives as much insight into a student’s mastery as a 3000-word essay.) This "just-in-time" coaching is often more impactful for the student and significantly reduces the instructor’s grading backlog.
Be cognizant of, and open-minded about, register. In some courses and disciplines, it is essential that students learn to speak in a specific way, adopting a formal register and/or following well-established codes (e.g. if they are being trained to speak in a highly regimented or ritualized environment, like a religious service or a courtroom). More often than not, however, it is perfectly acceptable for students to express themselves using more quotidian language or metaphors familiar to their peers. We encourage you to be open-minded about how "academic" language is meant to sound—welcoming students’ authentic expression into the discipline is, after all, one way that academic prose can remain fresh and relevant.
One professor, for example, shows her students a video of a spoken word performance by Taylor Mali, titled "Totally like whatever, you know," knowing that many of them initially will agree with his argument that students should leave behind their "upspeak" and learn to "speak with conviction"—at which point she shows them Melissa Lozada-Oliva's "Like Totally Whatever," which turns Mali's argument on its head, rejecting what she describes as a patriarchal, and entirely unnecessary, attempt to police language.