Every essay may soon end with an oral exam

Under a regulation now in draft at one university, written work would no longer count as proof of authorship. Each submission would be followed by an eight-minute oral defence, and the draft is unusually direct about the purpose: the defence would not measure knowledge. It would establish whether the student recognises their own sentences.

The room would hold two chairs, a timer face-down on the desk, and a printed copy of the essay with three sentences underlined in advance by whoever read it. The examiner would not ask what the student thinks about the topic. The examiner would ask what the student meant here, on this line, in this clause.

At minute two the question would arrive. You wrote that the argument fails on its own terms. Which term? Then a pause. Everything the regulation is trying to achieve happens inside that pause, and the regulation cannot say so, because a pause is not assessable and the grade sheet has boxes.

At minute five the harder problem would surface. The student in trouble is not necessarily the one who cheated. A frightened person produces the same silence as a dishonest one, and nothing in the eight minutes distinguishes them. A student who writes well and speaks badly would lose exactly as much as a student who wrote nothing at all.

“We would not be testing honesty,” an academic officer attached to the draft would say. “We would be testing whether a person can stand behind a sentence they put their name on. Those are two different things, and we are aware that we have equipment for only one of them.”

The objection that would actually stop it is arithmetic. Eight minutes multiplied by a cohort of several hundred, twice a semester, produces more contact time than the course itself contains, staffed by people who are already teaching it. Nobody argues about the philosophy of the viva. They argue about rooms.

The oral examination was pushed to the margins in many places for good reasons: slow, inconsistent, dependent on who happened to be sitting opposite you. It may come back for one reason only, which is that it is the only part of assessment that cannot be uploaded.