Implementing Oral Exams at Scale: Experiences from Graduate Student Instructors

This paper describes the implementation of oral exams, a more authentic and potentially more informative form of assessment than written exams, at a large scale (over 600 students), in the context of undergraduate introductory programming classes. Our study focuses on the experiences of the PhD students who both taught the classes as graduate student instructors (GSIs) and administered these exams, where their experiences were captured using surveys and audio recordings of instructor meetings. For those interested in implementing oral exams at large scales in their statistics and data science classes, and who view the amount of time and effort as worth it, we provide several recommendations based on the GSIs and our experiences. These include acquiring and listening to GSI feedback, using technology appropriately, mastering scheduling, training instructors, and preparing students for the exam experience. Our results are most applicable to GSIs at an introductory level on a large scale and with students with minimal statistical knowledge. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.