“I decided we would do an oral exam* because it’s a great way to see if people have actually learned anything from my course and aren’t just parroting notes. Because I can ask them to elaborate on their answers.”
Yeah and it’s also a great way to get otherwise good students to go blank because it isn’t possible to absorb every bit of complex information you spent 12 weeks rushing through, Barbara.
This “gotcha” style teaching fucking pisses me off. There is no time in the real world people are not going to be able to look up their notes. Fuck, half the time I’ll ask a professor something and they’ll be like “I’ll have to look that up later and get back to you.” Why? BECAUSE THEY’RE HUMAN AND THATS HOW BRAINS ARE.
This type of teaching only favours students that already had experience with the subject beforehand and freaks with amazing memories. This kind of understanding of the material only comes from experience and repetition, something that the traditional 12 weeks of rushed lectures/labs that discard each topic quickly to fit all of them in don’t do.
I fucking hate how much I am going into debt to be taught only the vaguest concepts but doing most of the teaching myself in my own time. Education under capitalism is a joke.
*An oral exam is an exam where instead of answering questions in a quiet room on paper, you have to answer questions on a live video call with your instructor.
I was able to get through college thinking that a Psych ba would allowe mr to improve my understanding of people
All it did was get me an ADHD diagnosis, a half-assed non-legit ‘diagnosis’ as autistic, and tons of money in debt with a field i will never be able to properly interact with
Its like playing morrowind for thr first time and putting all your points into Speed and then being unable to kill anything, this timr i cant just go back and timr and redo it lmao
I can tell you as a teacher that there is no method of assessment that does not disadvantage someone. Answering questions in writing in a quiet room is a nightmare scenario for somebody. For instance, I teach in a very poor area and have a lot of students with lagging writing skills who would be thrilled to have a chance to just talk through material they understand but struggle to express in writing. This is not to say that the education system under capitalism doesn’t do a shit job generally with the neurodivergent, but that’s mainly because there is no one-size-fits-all approach to education that works for everyone, but differentiating for everyone’s needs is hard and, ultimately, expensive. The bigger the class size, the smaller the staff, the less possible differentiation becomes, but of course, capital does not want to fund a robust education system.
New York State passed a law to reduce class sizes a few years ago, and the New York DOE just hasn’t done anything to comply with the law. They’re not hiring more teachers, they’re not building more schools. They don’t even have a plan to get to the required sizes. They’re just
I see. Geez, I knew teachers were overworked and understaffed, but that sounds dire
If you’re experienced, you learn ways to deal with it, and the school system can vary wildly from place to place in the US. But generally the the need for as few staff as possible to teach as many students as possible is in direct tension with every student getting their needs met.
This is why the bourgeoisie are increasingly turning to things like charter schools (essentially publicly-funded private schools), computerized instruction and, increasingly, AI, to try and solve this contradiction.
Capital is interested in educating it’s workforce. It’s the whole reason we have a public education system in the first place.
I like everything else under capitalism though, there is a point of “diminishing returns” - Costco does not want to have to train its employees how to do basic arithmetic, but outside of ensuring that there are people it can hire, it has no incentive to ensure every member of society receives a good education.
In fact, capitalism requires “losers” in addition to “winners”. It requires people to fall out of the system, to be homeless and poverty-stricken, in order to force compliance on the rest of us. When a child with a profound learning disability fails out of high school, and spends their life precariously hopping from low wage job to low wage job, our education system is working as intended.
“The purpose of a system is what it does”
In college right now for an animation course in engineering.
We were literally thaught how to make AI slop (deepfakes, AI generated images) by the professors assistant since the professor refused to show up. He went on how this “won’t replace us” and how It was “revolutionary” even though It looked like shit. Mind you he’s the same guy who told us “Don’t pirate Windows, buy It for 5€.”.
Sometimes I think of dropping out and going freelance as an artist even though I’m only a month into my first year. Though I’m very afraid how and where to promote my stuff
It’s very scary how “flying by the seat of their pants” and low quality higher education seems to be. We really are having a capitalist education crisis.
i’m not sure that i agree that oral exams are inherently bad, i just think they need to be taken with the instructor having a spirit of charitability and recognising that students can’t remember every little detail. evidently this wasn’t the case with you but the typical exam paper format isn’t very good for neurodivergent students either in a very different way, like i’d always do awfully in exams by my standards so obviously i’d be more inclined to think that format is worse than oral.
It really depends for me. I like practical exams, but it’s the interview type set up that’s giving me anxiety. I suck at written exams too, but les than when I’m being stared at and judged
yeah, i mean if it makes you anxious then it clearly is worse for you! i don’t want to come off as minimising your struggles, just that examination methods should probably be more flexible in general.
Absolutely! My prof said it’s a bit tricky because he needs to feel for gaps if he wants to give a high mark but he will look for what’s actually known to give a passing grade. So he tries to steer the conversation according to clues you might drop in your answers, but can’t overlook mistakes or should-be-known.
I really like oral exams more than written because of ADD, but if we think outside that dichotomy than having the students write something they taught themselves would be much better. But that requires a lot of educators in even a mid-sized class.
Going through university while mentally ill is a horrible experience. So fun having to email professors asking for extra time on an assignment here and there because I had an episode and effectively being told ‘tough shit’. Very cool, thanks! I love how callous the entire institution is!! Reminds me why I never reach out for help in the first place. I don’t know how quite to articulate it, but something about the way higher education works feels so antithetical to the process of learning, but maybe the experience of NTs is very different.
If you’re in the US, have you tried speaking to your “student success” representative, or the disabled students office? You may be able to get more time based on either health needs or learning disability needs. If you have been diagnosed (or can be) with ADHD at all, you should be able to get all kinds of assistance, extra time for exams, etc.
I did, but they told me it wasn’t an option, even with the therapist note and documentation of PTSD I provided. Frustrating, but nothing else I can do. Thank you anyways though!
Sorry to hear. That sucks! I hope you can find some way to make it work for you.
Consider yourself lucky that you didn’t live in the USSR/Russia, where the exams in universities were/are predominantly oral, several times a semester.
You are expected to demonstrate your understanding the topic you study broadly and in depth, and that means you should be able to answer just about any questions asked about the topic.
You draw a “ticket”, which contains a few questions on the paper, everyone in the class then gets a couple hours to solve, then the professors (usually several in the same room) will randomly choose one of you to get to the front, present your prepared answers, and get grilled by the professors until they are satisfied.
There are more tickets than there are students, so no two student will ever get the same problems/questions. These cover pretty much everything taught during the semester.
There is no way to cheat, no way to skim through the course. You must know your subject well, or else just don’t bother at all until you are ready. Throughout your course, you are expected to go through several dozens of “tickets”. You get used to it eventually.
Not to say they don’t come with their own problems and downsides, and the quality of the teachers and the education system in general matter, but there is a reason why the USSR (and still today’s Russia) produces some of the best specialists in the world.
Damn, harsh. I very much look up to those Soviet scientists.
I guess they got to try the class as many times as they wanted, and it was probably far cheaper too which is at least an upside. I think half of my anxiety about University comes from the fact that I’m financially struggling while going in to debt haha
Yeah I can imagine how a poorly taught class/university would not sufficiently prepare their students for this kind of exam.
I never understood “filter” classes, ones with failure rates >50%. Because to me it seems either the professors are fucking awful or that it’s deliberately meant to be failed and retaken multiple times, charging full price each time
Some classes, acting to filter out students before they take higher level courses in a subject, makes sense to me.
If you cannot understand Organic Chemistry 101 as a freshman, perhaps Microbiology isn’t the subject you should major in. If the worst student in med school still becomes a doctor, filtering these applicants is arguably a social good.
But. This only works when you remove the profit motive from universities. If there is no financial incentive to fail people, only reputation of the institution.
(I am neglecting the very real issues some people have with learning differences, poor primary education, etc. And as someone who is profoundly dyslexic myself, I can testify that these are real issues that need to be acknowledged. But again, a society that prioritized education as opposed to profit, that prioritized intellectual excellence instead of securing funding for sports, would go a long way towards mitigating those issues in the first place. If Texas spent more time and money on education, then they do on stadiums for example, students would be entering university with a well-rounded general education, instead of being barely literate, they would be in a position to take a difficult filter class and succeed or fail based on their merits instead of as a result of what zip code they were born in.)
I’m gonna recommend you check out a series published in Naked Capitalism called What If Medicine Were Taught Like a Science. It’s written by a microbiologist who has taught at medical schools for decades. Organic chemistry isn’t harder to understand than inorganic, we just teach it poorly so it acts as a filter class.
Cuba shows that we could create as many doctors as teachers each year, we just choose not to in order to artificially inflate their wages.
At the end of the day the core issue is the profit motive.
So long as education is gatekept to prevent social mobility, and doctors have a vested interest in keeping their numbers low and their salary high, we will have these issues.
Especially as college costs continue to go up.
In a communist Utopia, people will still fail organic chemistry. When the dictatorship of capitalism is abolished, people will still fail advanced math courses.
And that’s okay. Individuals have different skills, different strengths and weaknesses, not everyone is equipped to be an astrophysicist.
But when you throw capital into the mix, when you turn University into a daycare for your young adults, And you structure society in such a way that without an advanced degree you are doomed to poverty, You have created a system with perverce incentives.
This means that the person who has the resources, even if they don’t necessarily have the innate skill or desire, can brute force their way to a degree.
Whereas the next Einstein, the next Newton, the next Hubble, is working at a fast food joint, their mind preoccupied not with the mysteries of the universe, but with how they’re going to pay their cell phone bill this month.
This morning, our generations Lenin had to wake up 2 hours early, take three buses, to arrive on time to a job that barely pays enough to survive. And instead of pontificating on theory, they are being ground down by poverty.
Sometimes it’s because the Professors (who are, yes awful) feel there’s a minimum level of knowledge to be taught and that’s the barrier. Which might be fair, if University were free. And there are courses I struggled at because I didn’t have to learn appropriate prerequisites that aren’t usually taught until 2nd-3rd year (Partial Differential Equations and stuff beyond, mostly)
Ideally you could have 6-7 year BSc-Beng courses for difficult courses where it really is required to learn advanced math to even start learning the subject. Not every subject takes the same time to learn to a Bachelor’s level and not every person, even extremely smart people, learn at the same pace.
To illustrate, the working class scientist Michael Faraday famously went through almost everything Maxwell did in electromagnetism in a qualitative way but his struggles with manipulating even basic arithmetic crippled his progress towards a unified theory (he might have done an end run around the Aether concept with just a bit of trigonometry). Imagine if he’d had another decade to work on it instead of having to get a job as an apprentice at age 14.
But see “free university” as a prerequisite for that.
On the other hand as a person with adhd I love oral exams because then I don’t really have to pay attention in class. I can bullshit my way to a B-A+ with the bare minimum of academic effort. I’ll be able to yap so much they can’t ask any questions and then they’ll bemoan the fact we don’t have more time because I seem to have a wealth of knowledge hehehe.
Written exams though? Hello executive dysfunction
Ha, that rules (the being able to talk part, not the written exam dysfunction part. I feel you pain).
I guess our ADHD manifests in different ways, I get overwhelmed in interview type situations and end up forgetting which words I want to use “Uhh… I mean…nuh what’s the word for that again?”
Another thing I do is tell them that I am nervous! It has only yielded positive results so far
Thanks for the advice
I think it also depends on the course content and the level of technical knowledge.
Plus the oral exam set up, i.e. if you don’t hit all the required points by not effectively using your time to regurgitate the course content you fail.
That sucks! That happens to me too, but I try to yap thru it or jump to a different association. “I don’t recall the specific technical term at the moment, so let me instead describe the practice” (-3 minutes of interview time spent on something that is trivial to discuss) then I often end up doing something like “now when I describe it like this, it of course sounds quite similar to this, but they differ in key ways, which are…” Yapyapyap “oh you have a question professor?”
I’d like to consider myself a freak with an amazing memory but, yeah, that on the spot pressure/call-outs were especially rough in graduate-level sciences. I get the whole in-situ “determine the limits of your knowledge on the subject” but damn if it didn’t feel like the primary investigator of the lab I was in just saw me as a lab rat to poke and prod for his curiosity when I was presenting research updates.
Also not fun to learn I probably had test anxiety for my entire scholastic career & never had accomodations suggested to me until I was nearly done with my coursework :/
username etc etc
I don’t get it?
*An oral exam is an exam where instead of answering questions in a quiet room on paper, you have to answer questions on a live video call with your instructor.
this, along with your comment, makes your username funny/relevant to the post
Gotcha, I didn’t consider the video call aspect cause my grillings were in front of 10 of my peers where I had to draw out the electron pushing mechanism for how the molecule I was researching produces hydrogen peroxide.
I did get it right after like 20 excruciating minutes standing in front of the whiteboard reasoning out the mechanism, but it was never previously taught to me by my PI.
The livestreamed collapse name is based on some old meme about how the future sucks & the only cool technology we have is some pocket screen to doomscroll the collapse of society & climate with.
To bei honest, I highly favour oral exams. This semester I had to chose between a 20 page termpaper or a 20 minute oral exam, which was a no-brainer to me. Writing a termpaper clashes with my ADHD. I have to keep tabs on like 15 books and the according notes and work on the project virtually uninterrupted for ~1 month without any kind of feedback until I hand it in? Thats a nightmare… Oral exams on the other hand are awesome. I can read like 2 books in the matter in around a week (because I don’t need to take notes) for preparation and can just geek out with my professor about the topic. I think I just favour the conversation style of the exam, when my prof reacts to my answer I can infer if it was right or if I should come back to it. I don’t think your opinion is wrong or something, but different flavours of neurodivergency have different needs. I really like that more offen than not I can choose the category of my exam :)
I have to keep tabs on like 15 books and the according notes and work on the project virtually uninterrupted for ~1 month without any kind of feedback
The different manifestations of ADHD are fascinating, I don’t think I could work on anything for a month. I’d do literally anything else and finally sit down to write it in the last 24 hours*
*Realistically last six hours
Haha me tooooo.
I once got honors marks for a paper I wrote 4 hours before due date lmao
And yet I once got a really bad score for a paper I tried to force myself to write a week early
One time I snuck out of a class that had a strict attendance policy for some petty reason unique to the instructor just to write a 20 page paper of pure
slop for my next class that I forgot was due the same day instead of the next week.I’m talking crawling behind desks and slipping out the door without getting spotted.
I don’t have any kind of diagnosis, but I have some mild suspicions, and I have basically this problem on a shorter time scale at work.
A significant part of my job duties is taking data from a bunch of tools and departments and writing up an email that lays that data out in a way that a stupid executive can understand. The emails only need to go out two or three times a day, which is good because they take about an hour to write up normally. Since that’s only 2 to 3 hours of work, it should be easily doable. I cannot force myself to start working on one of these emails until about 20 minutes before it’s due, at which point I rush through the process as quickly as possible.
They’re usually like 20 to 30 minutes late, but my management thinks mine are really thorough so I think I’ve been a little shielded from consequences.
I work faster under pressure, and I think I work better under pressure also, but I also hate pressure. It’s so goddamn stressful. I wish I just had a force of will to make myself start these fuckin things on time.
I’m about a decade into my career so I’m pretty relaxed about the pressure now, but it was pretty bad at uni and starting out.
Being able to work quickly and make good decisions is a great skill, you just have to find something that isn’t like manufacturing human wood chippers.
The trick is to find a job that is all fast paced urgent bullshit and have enough autonomy that no one bothers you during the downtime. It’s also helpful because if something’s so urgent people are calling you for five minutes updates, you get continual little motivational bumps.
This has been my experience too. Good luck finding such a job if you have a degree outside IT, though. Doubly if it’s a degree involving actually touching physical reality.
Paper exams are bad enough fuck oral exams. Last one i did was oral German exam ages ago and I had rehearsed what I was going to say properly but the second i sat down my brain just went “nah” and i couldn’t remember a fucking thing.
What kind of exam method is that???
Thinking back, the first thing that started my spiral in highschool and eventually snowballed into me dropping out was a mandatory public speaking assignment in a fucking health class during sophomore year. I was a pretty decent student up until then.
I had really bad social anxiety that no amount of “suck it up and get over it” would have fixed. I wasn’t able to confront and remedy it until years later.
But yeah, forced to give an oral exam in front of a class of 30+, just skipped the entire class, took the F, my grades tanked to the point it was impossible to recover without repeating years and summer school. My mom already barely had enough money as it was, forget going to summer school. So I just dropped out.
The teacher was completely indifferent when I told her in private and gave me the whole “you either do it or fail” so yeah. A year later I dropped out. Life didn’t really turn out much different had I graduated, though so there’s that. Maybe I would’ve struggled less in my 20s, idk.
“Sink or swim” was a lingering shitty
way to traumatize kids into swimming, and it’s also a lingering shitty attitude for teaching in general.It’s weird how little not having that piece of paper actually matters, especially if you just lie about it on job applications. (I dropped out because of depression)
I think our entire approach to education and training is just fundamentally flawed from the ground up, like so many other systems in place.
The education system should be tailored to identify each person’s passions, talents, and aptitudes from a much earlier age. I know peoples’ preferences change but by the time you enter high school, you are old enough to start specializing for your future imo.
While kids still have access to the resources public education provides and the time to take advantage of them, we should be giving them every opportunity to explore everything they can learn and focus on learning what they like. And I definitely don’t just mean ‘practical’ or ‘utilitarian’ skills. Some kid is an amazing painter? Let them triple the amount of art classes if they don’t want to take a foreign language and math. Mathematician? Writer? Chemist? Same goes.
I understand a well rounded education is important so people can have a broader view of the world and understand the work other people do, but what we’re doing now is wasting so much potential.
Super idealist I know, but how did we make a society where the kids are an afterthought?
Nah, don’t feel bad. Idealist or not, it’s practical and rational to make sure your people are reaching their full desired potential. That’s how you have a healthy strong society and probably one of the many reasons our current society is falling apart.
Yeah viewing public education as a ‘money sink’ or something that needs to be ‘efficient’ has trickled down into how some people view their own children as investments or liabilities.
Take all the money from defense funding and put it in education.
MIC: has Congress force school districts to spend the new funding equipping every classroom with armed ChatGPT quadcopter roboteachers
Sulvor: How could you possibly think that’s what I–
Another day, another banger
Unless you’ve left something out, I feel like you’re being unfair to the instructor here by assuming malice for giving oral exams. Have you voiced this concern with her? My reaction is that this instructor is putting enormously more effort into her students than she’s being paid to, I’m not sure you realize how much more of a time investment that is.
I’ve had students come to me about test anxiety and if I trust that they have a decent understanding then I’ll offer an option to test orally instead. A lot of students do much better with oral exams. It allows me to say okay, you can’t answer this particular question, but I can probe adjacent things to give partial credit. I can see you do have some understanding of what the question is meant to test for, I realize that this specific detail is tripping you up and you would do fine with a question that didn’t involve that one hiccup. With a written exam, I’m just grading on how well you answer the one question. It’s not reasonable to take stabs at how much better you might do with a slightly different question, because that would be massively influenced by the biases of what I’m expecting out of you before the exam starts - it’s hard for that not to end up at better grades for students I like more. I can’t look beyond how well the steps you’ve written on the paper lead towards answering the question you were given.
In a better world I would offer them for everyone, but it’s a massive time investment. I’m reluctant to make that offer unless I already have some confidence they’re decent with the material, because if I give an oral exam and they’re struggling it might be hard for me to not leak frustration with having two hours of my time burned for no benefit, and if they read that on me it won’t help with test anxiety and won’t be better for anyone.
Seriously, just start a dialogue with her about this in private.
Yeah, you’re probably right. I shouldn’t let my own anxiety make me unfair to others. Teachers have it hard as it is.
This type of teaching only favours students that already had experience with the subject beforehand
I couldn’t have survived most of the time not doing this. Spend my summer researching random stuff and base much of my class work on that. Only way my AuDHD could make it.
That’s worked for me to far too. I’m scared about 3rd year though. What if I’m too dumb to make it?
Real. I’m scared I’m already reaching that limit.
