For a while, oral exams felt like a legacy format: important in some disciplines, occasionally used for defences, but rarely the default at scale. Then generative AI arrived. Across higher education, I’m seeing more and more programmes rebalancing how they assess learning. Not necessarily by trying to “out-detect” AI (a game nobody wins for long), but by redesigning assessment so that what matters most is harder to outsource: understanding, judgement, and the ability to explain.
That is one of the reasons oral assessment is making a comeback. Sometimes it returns as a classic oral exam. Often, it returns as a hybrid model: a take-home submission (with aids allowed) followed by an oral defence. The take-home work supports deeper learning over time; the defence gives examiners a robust way to validate understanding and authorship in real time.