An Assessment of Oral Exams in Introductory CS
Peter Ohmann · 2019
Assessment of student knowledge is a crucial and challenging part of course design. Especially in computer science courses in the United States, written examinations are very common. While written exams offer a number of advantages in convenience and familiarity, they are also inflexible and prone to question misinterpretation. In contrast to written tests, oral exams offer the prospect of an interactive conversation where students can express their knowledge in a variety of ways while asking clarifying questions. In this paper, we present and assess our implementation of oral exams in an introductory computer science course. We describe the motivation for and resulting features of our design, including a simplified rubric style for equitable, on-the-fly grading. We also perform an assessment relative to more traditional written exams. We find the time commitment for instructors to be manageable and comparable to traditional exams. Through post-semester surveys, students self-report spending slightly more time studying for oral exams, but rate the difficulty as similar to written exams. Both qualitative and quantitative student feedback indicates that oral exams can be effective and well-received.