Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR courses

Guidance and resources to support EPICUR course development, cc-by-sa

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Oral Exam

Why oral exams?

The oral examination is a popular assessment method in the Nordic education system, in part due to a Nordic tradition of oral assessment and a focus on dialogic authentic assessment.

Dialogue
Oral exams provide dynamic, dialogic opportunities for examinees to explain and review their understanding. Whilst students can find them stressful, when managed well, they can also be positive experiences thanks to the opportunity to clarify and expand on answers.

Probing
Whilst written assessment products can give students the opportunities to record the depth and breadth of their understanding, a follow up oral exam provides the opportunity to probe the students’ depth of understanding even further. They can also help validate what an individual student has contributed to a group assignment.

Motivation
Oral exams engage learners in ‘cognitively elaborating’ their understanding, a process found to contribute to learner motivation and deeper learning (Slavin, 2014). By explaining what we think we know and understand, we must find ways to articulate our understanding in succinct and accurate ways.

5 key points about oral exams

Mixed assessment methods
Try combining assessment methods, where students in groups or individually first submit a portfolio, or presentation or paper followed by an individual or group oral exam. A diversity of assessment methods can enhance the alignment between assessment methods and diverse LOs and make the assessment process more diverse and inclusive.
Role play oral exam
Include oral exam role play in the course. In this way, students can practise asking and answering indicative oral exam questions. This is particularly valuable for students with no experience of oral exams, and it gives all students the opportunity to experience how the teacher/examiner will facilitate the exam.
Mitigate student anxiety
Incorporate strategies during the course and the oral exam to mitigate student anxiety.
- Host Q&A sessions about the exam during the course.
- Group students who are familiar and unfamiliar with oral exams and encourage them to share insights and questions.
- Implement the oral exam role play activity.
- Remind students they can ask you to repeat or re-phrase a question during the exam
- Give unambiguous guidance especially if a student is answering a question incorrectly or going off on a tangent.
- Check there is always a glass of water available for the student.
Starting an oral exam
It can be useful to start the exam with an activity or a question which students have had time to prepare. For example, the student could present for 3-5 minutes on a project or activity they have worked on during the course or they could be given a question to prepare 30 minutes before the exam. This sets the scene for the exam and it means the student can start by sharing what they have prepared. If students have worked in a group, the exam could start with a group presentation and be followed by individual oral exams.
Plan oral exam questions
By planning possible oral exam questions which align with the learning outcomes you are assessing you can prepare a range of relevant questions. This will take the pressure off you to come up with new questions during the exam and you and the student can be more assured that they have had a fair opportunity to do their best.

See the DUT Guide below for more on these and another five recommended key points.

Oral exams in practice

At SDU, most of the 5^th semester engineering students participate in a 10 ECTS course called Experts in Team Innovation (EIT). The students work exclusively in facilitated groups co-developing innovative solutions for interdisciplinary engineering problems identified by companies or regional stakeholders. The course assessment includes a portfolio of individual and group tasks including a group oral exam. Here you can access the group oral exam guide provided for students and the group oral exam rubric which is co-designed with the students to support their preparation for the group oral exam. The course is accompanied by an online toolkit with a range of resources to support group innovation, collaboration and reflection.

Links to resources for oral exams

Hurford, Donna (2020) DUT Guide: Strategies for criteria-aligned, fair and inclusive oral exams. Dansk Universitetspædagogisk Tidsskrift, vol. 15, (29), p.119-127. Available at: https://dun-net.dk/media/1601822/dut_29_hurford_dut_guide_strategies_for_criteria-aligned_fair_and_inclusive.pdf

SDU. Oral Exam Checklist for Bias Aware Assessment – 16 check-ins

References

Hazen, Helen. (2020). Use of oral examinations to assess student learning in the social sciences. Journal of Geography in Higher Education. DOI:10.1080/03098265.2020.1773418.
Roberts, Celia., Sarangi, Srikant., Southgate, Lesley., Wakeford, Richard. and Wass, Val. (2000). Oral examinations— equal opportunities, ethnicity, and fairness in the MRCGP’ British Medical Journal, 320 (5), 370-374.
Slavin, Robert. E. (2014). Cooperative learning and Academic Achievement: why does groupwork work? Anales de psicologia, 30 (3) 785-791

Innovative Assessment

Author(s)

This resource sheet has been co-written or written by

Donna Hurford (SDU)

Related Resource Sheets

Next steps

If you need further support with developing your course, please contact your local teaching support unit.
If you need further information on offering your course for EPICUR, please contact your EPICUR institutional coordinator.

Contact Details

Local teaching support units

EPICUR Institutional Coordinators

Adam Mickiewicz University
Karolina Choczaj
karmench@amu.edu.pl

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Nikos Kouloussis
nikoul@agro.auth.gr

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Michael Zacherle
zacherle@kit.edu

University of Amsterdam
Tiffany Boersma
t.a.boersma@uva.nl

Universität Freiburg
Charlotte Langowski
charlotte.langowski@zv.uni-freiburg.de

Université de Haute-Alsace
Léa Ziri
lea.ziri@uha.fr

Universität für Bodenkultur Wien
Nicolas Fries
nicolas.fries@boku.ac.at

University of Southern Denmark
Ida Thøstesen
ilt@sdu.dk

University of Strasbourg
Pascale Nachez
pnachez@unistra.fr

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Further use as OER explicitly permitted:
This Resource Sheet within the Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR Courses was created by Donna Hurford, University of Southern Denmark.
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