May 15, 2022
The Oral Exam Is Back: How Schools Are Fighting to Keep Thinking From Getting Outsourced
A well-written essay no longer proves a student can think. That single, uncomfortable fact is rewriting how schools grade argument, sending the oral exam, an old and expensive tool, back into classrooms that abandoned it decades ago. That small, blunt fix says more about the state of critical thinking education than any policy memo could. The essay used to be the whole test. Now it is just the opening argument in a conversation designed to catch whether a real mind produced it. The Actual Problem, Named Precisely The friction here is not that students are cheating, exactly, though some are.
