This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's very apparent to both student and teachers how well a topic is understood. Marks are rarely contested and in my experience most students think the process is fair.
Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....
So, I grew up in the former Soviet Union. Starting with ninth grade entrance entrance and exit exams were like that. I remember I had to take university physics exam just to be able to qualify for a consideration. It was fairly rough, but I think in a way, good system because it sifted out the wannabes early on.
Same. The focus on written exams rated blindly and uniformly at the US higher education system always puzzled me. I guess that's the only way to scale things up when you pay professors and teachers living wages?
I expect a lot of the social anxiety can be mitigated by arranging things so that students get a chance to know the examiners and build a rapport with them ahead of time. (E.g., if they’re an instructor then make sure they have office hours and encourage students to go.) I’ve got my mental health challenges but that’s how things worked in my grad school and I got by just fine.
I can see this being a problem in the US when it comes to "accommodations" in general. Students with an ADHD diagnosis can claim it causes just about any difficulty and get accommodations for it. The local (top ranked, but everyone's seen all the stories coming out of the Ivies...) college here gives students with ADHD double time on exams and has them take it in a special disabilities proctoring center where it's a struggle to get the staff there to even enforce those time limits. Obviously this also makes it infinitely easier to outright cheat as well.
Not a chance you will get past the "my ADHD makes it hard for me to think about these things verbally" challenge at institutions like this.
Oh, at least in the post Soviet tradition of oral exams, you are given plenty of time to think and prepare your argument before you start an actual conversation with the examining professor. And if you need to think more during the exam to answer a tricky question, the professor just shifts to talk to another student who is ready to present their case for the time being. So it is less of a public speaking and more of a conversation where you can take a pause to think through an argument, or a proof, or a problem.
as someone with ADHD who always finished exams first or was the designated spokesperson for group presentations...
I have no idea why you'd want to be taking a test a second longer than you already have to.
Either you know the material or you don't, anything taking a lot of time is borderline stuff where you're scrapping for points you might not deserve in the first place lol
> I have no idea why you'd want to be taking a test a second longer than you already have to.
The theory was that ADHD students have trouble sustaining concentration, so extra time allows for thought breaks and distractions. The idea was that 2 hours for the ADHD student would be similar to 1 hour of concentration for a non-ADHD student, and therefore the inequity had been partially compensated.
The teachers I know have the same observation that you do: The extra test time isn’t usually used by the ADHD students, but when other students (or maybe more accurately, parents) discover that extra test time was available, most of the high performing students suddenly got diagnosed with ADHD at the same time. They were the ones staying extra long to proofread their work.
For the elementary/junior high teachers I know the schools’ solution was to give everyone the same extended test taking time. Easiest way to remove the incentive to seek out a fake diagnosis without taking anything away from anyone.
ADHD is known to be able to affect speed and consistency of output, even of mastered material, and in a variety of ways -- hence "I have no idea..."
Standard diagnostic questionnaires commonly reference this. The last part of your comment reflects a lack of understanding of both human cognition and recall and ADHD in particular.
Absolutely not saying this is even the most common case but: people “without ADHD” but with a diagnosis can use the extra time effectively.
It is most clear when there is some kind of problem solving involved. An extra 30 min to figure out the trick or plan a detailed approach is a real benefit.
The other case is where there’s some missing knowledge but with a bunch of extra effort you can figure out how to do it. That would be something like re-constructing a self-balancing binary tree from some half-remembered lecture notes.
European universities also have accommodations and extra time etc. And yes it's an arms race. Though at some point it will simply inflate away the value of the degree, but educators will stand there baffled, not understanding how it could happen.
This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments.
But what it does threaten to do is effecting abandon all the efficiencies of the written word.
When higher education evolved into a mass system in the 1800s and into the 1900s, pure oral examination was looked at as super inefficient. A written paper could be handed in and graded without lining everyone up in front of a panel.
The oral system scales poorly. One examiner can only hear so many students in a day. There are damn good reasons Medieval universities were small and modern ones are not.
Requiring every major paper to be defended live reintroduces the bottleneck that written exams were designed to escape.
Accessibility takes a hit too. Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective?
So while it’s nice that academics are rediscovering the old ways, I don’t really see this as a scalable answer to raising education levels for the masses, but more of a knee jerk way to try to bypass the obvious technological disruption by returning to non-scalable, inaccessible ways of doing things that our ancestors abandoned for a reason.
It has its place for graduate students and smaller volume education systems. It’s fine for keeping the ivory tower clean. But it’s not the answer to expanding education to everyone and taking advantage of the technological disruption to advance education and learning throughout greater humanity, which is what AI definitely possesses as a possibility.
But even with the written exam, wouldn't the bottleneck still be there where the professors still need to read through all the papers? I guess its definitely more efficient and asynchronous, but I can't imagine by much assuming the same and equal rigor is applied.
Oral Defences have a long established tradition in Denmark, but recently there’s been real cut back on this as a money saving exercise. So both teachers and Students are familiar with this form of examination.
So for a dane this reads like “back to the old way”, rather than anything new or novel.
This just feels like good educational practice too? I remember really enjoying TA'ing as an undergrad for courses I took the previous year, because THAT'S when I felt I _really_ learned the material.
Likewise, when I was a lab consultant, I felt like advising others was when the concepts of Linux/systems administration _really_ sunk in.
I always crammed the bare minimum for any kind of assessment (by the end of college I was actively avoiding any classes with final exams), but when I need to be able to teach someone else or explain my understanding in a live environment? That's when I _actually_ learn.
I had to do an oral defense of my thesis in graduate school. When you've spent months and months writing something extremely obscure... well, I'd hope that it's not that difficult.
I wish we were doing this in the US even before AI was an issue. I suspect it would reorient students to their work in some pretty cool ways. I mean, it might feel like torture for some and maybe that’s not so much a bad thing. I’m sure I’m not thinking of some downsides to this too, but it seems like such a great counter against “factory” schooling. Of course, this could be a lot more work for faculty and could be hard to keep up with a huge student population. Again, maybe a feature more than a bug.
I'm teaching a university math course next semester and I've been messing around with a solution to this that my old analysis professor used to employ. Every week, they take home a handful of theory questions. These aren't turned in for credit. But, every week, there'll be a short quiz where one of those questions are asked verbatim, along with a small follow up.
That felt like a very natural solution to me. Of course, worst case scenario, they just blindly generate and memorize the proofs without thinking. But I think the follow ups will catch them in that case. Moreover, I choose to believe that >90% of my students are willing to at least put in the work of scrutinizing those proofs which is honestly not bad exercise in its own right.
I would love to do oral exams directly, the logistics with the number of students I have just make that hard. I know we're trialing it with the less populated special topics courses.
I find it quite surprising that Danish high school students (the article isn't about university) apparently did write digital exams with internet access until now, so basically open book.
The more I read about articles like these, I grow even more convinced that the education industry as a whole, regardless of the country or stature, has kind of lost their plot.
Sometimes I even wonder if this is the outcome of sheer laziness, fear or both.
When I speak to professors, teachers and students - It's also surprising that "top tier" institutions are fighting AI harder (outside extremely specific courses like Harvard’s flagship CS50, MBA courses at Wharton (UPenn) and MIT) while "bottom tier" institutions are completely embracing it and rebuilding their curriculum around it. One CS professor at a "bottom tier" CSU mentioned to me that he's actively going completely "open book using AI" - students are allowed to use anything they want from Claude to Codex to OpenCode to finish assignments but the assignments have now changed from "blurt out quicksort" to "let's sort N natural numbers in a cache efficient way using least amount of resources". I would hire the latter over the former anytime. I am tired of interviewing candidates who can shit out quicksort before I can even finish my sentence but stare at me dumbfounded when I ask them to sort people's name serialized in unicode.
In my opinion, the bulk of traditional education has been a mix of memorization of facts, knowing inference rules, and applying inference rules to those facts, coupled with recall.
Before the age of LLMs, only very expensive-to-build rule-based expert systems were able to replicate that functionality. Humans were just simply cheaper and way more reliable.
In 2026, Frontier models are exceedingly, across the board, across industries, breaking records and challenging those notions on cost, capability and sophistication.
Trying to replicate how education used to operate pre-frontier LLMs is like forcing people to farm by hand in the age of automated tractors that have LIDAR, Vision, RTK on board.
I'm not discounting other elements of learning like collaborative debate, clinical/lab work, Socratic reasoning, emotional intelligence and the development of a professional network - but I argue these skills are not limited to a school or university setting. Infact, a lot of this is distorted in a school or university setting compared to the real world.
I have been filing my own taxes, including complexities like equity, real estate and business income for over a decade now, so it's not just a simple 1040 and 540. Reading through IRS documentation, talking to EAs and CPAs to fill in ambiguities and gaps was pretty expensive in terms of time and money.
Both Claude Opus and GPT 5.5 now, as of 2026, answer all my tax questions correctly. Those thousands of dollars in time and money I had spent has been replaced by a single $20 subscription. Unless tax codes drastically change every year, that $20 is a one time cost.
If I were to begin my tax journey in 2026, I would never had to spend those dollars: dozens of tax professionals are out of a job - all their education is for nothing.
It's entirely irrelevant whether they passed their exams by carving answers out on granite, taking their exams in a jail cell on an island proctored by Catholic Nuns under the watchful guard of automatic machine guns manned by T-1000s, I just don't need them anymore. For my usecase, these humans and their credentials provide 0 additional value over a one-time $20 expense, no matter how complicated it was for them to get their credential.
All this "reject AI, do it by hand" is just insanity at worst and laziness at best.
That said, I'm personally unsure what the future of education in the age of tractors is like but removing weeds, planting seeds, watering them, all by hand is certainly not it.
It's my understanding that most countries - developed or developing - are bottlenecked on educating their masses due to lack of qualified teachers.
That's a bandwidth problem. Having those teachers listen to oral arguments from a handful of students is not solving the core bandwidth problem. All these shenanigans is doing a disservice to the public.
Depends on what skills you want the students to have.
In e.g., philosophy, allowing students to write their assessments with the help of LLMs changes the students’ depth of understanding, as well as their ability to synthesize, formalize, and drum up their own arguments and objections.
These are all useful skills, even in a post-LLM world.
This is great. Sorry, but the Western World has to stop normalizing extreme introvertism. Humans are social. We rely on communication and cooperation to survive. Allowing kids to shelter themselves from interaction and communication during crucial development stages will only hamper them in life.
Can you explain why? As I understand it, you're supposed to be able to talk about the work in which you already invested the mental energy to write. Writing involves much more "brain work" than speaking, so if you've truly written the work in question, you should be capable of speaking about it -- unless you have some sort of disability, in which case, there are probably alternative avenues.
Yeah as much as I like the idea, I know there will be some brilliant and driven students who would have a hard time with this due to temperament. For me, if I’m excited about something, I can talk for hours. Maybe not so for everyone though. Then again, not all brilliant and driven students test well either, so… pick your poison?
This is a good move. I teach a summer async remote course that's ending next week, but I'm giving all the students incompletes until they come back to campus and take an in-person exam the first week of classes. All homework is worth a marginal amount, and if they fail the final they fail the class.
I'm not going to spend my effort policing whether they're using AI or not in their class work because it's a losing battle. At the end of the day, they can either demonstrate mastery of the material at an exam or not. It makes the exams higher stakes, but that's where we are.
I hope at least the homework is good prep for the exams, otherwise if its grade value is marginal there's little point from the PoV of a student that just needs to pass the class to take it seriously
I'd never pay to have you as a teacher, I'm sorry. Maybe your move makes a sense for the reputation of your university's degree, but as a student willing to pay to learn remotely, I'd not accept to be treated like children.
Regular graded assignments is the "treated like children" version. The adult treatment is that you can come to class if you want, you can do the assignments if you want, but if not, that's fine too. There is one test at the end, and it's your responsibility to prepare for it as you want. You manage your own time, we offer consultation, lectures, assignments, tutorials etc. but you can reject all of this and learn the material from some other textbook, and as long as you've mastered the material, you'll get a good grade at the exam. This is how German universities work, for the most part.
The problem is the vicious feedback nowadays of online student evaluations of professors. Professors that are rigorous get complaints and low rankings, kids don't sign up for their sections etc. Kids (parents) pay the administration and the administration wants to keep the customer happy. The only real answer are standardized exams (such as licensure exams) which are beyond parent pocketbook capture.
Or like Europe. You don't pay tuition, but if you slack off, and don't progress properly, you only have a limited number of exam retries and limited number of funded semesters. If you fail, you're out, choose another profession. You're not a customer, you're someone who is trying to prove themselves and get certified by experts on their knowledge. The "customer" of the university is whoever will glance at the degree paper and tries to ascertain the skill/knowledge level of the outgoing student. They have to give a good signal there. The reason this doesn't work in the US, is because they want mediocre children of rich parents to be pushed through, because college is a networking and social class-based finishing school, not a place for acquiring knowledge.
(Also, there should be electives, but the rigorous backbone of a degree should be mandatory, so "students won't choose this course" doesn't come up.)
> The reason this doesn't work in the US, is because they want mediocre children of rich parents to be pushed through, because college is a networking and social class-based finishing school, not a place for acquiring knowledge.
Out of curiosity, which US university did you attend? I went to a well-known and highly-regarded public university in California, and they absolutely did not coddle their students. Poor-performing students regularly washed out.
None, but have interacted with American students at European universities and they were very lost without all the coddling and all kinds of support infrastructure and basically getting their life organized by administrators who personally attended to their matters and reminded them a million times about deadlines and so on. They were unprepared for actually having to manage their own studies, read up on rules, find out where to register for something, until when, etc. etc.
That happens when American students first join US universities too. It takes a few weeks for freshmen to get acquainted with the new reality of being completely responsible for handling their affairs and ensuring their success. It’s nothing to slam them about; that’s an artifact of coming from a system that provides more guide rails during primary education and childhood than European children might enjoy.
Tenure protects professors against students' complaints (often for the better, sometimes for the worse). Also, the administration already knows that students complain about professors who are tough, and don't typically pay heed to those complaints. Parents don't really have recourse either: what are they going to do, send their kid to Podunk State instead?
Yes indeed. College departments are well-known for cutting the ranks of the professors who have proven track records of boosting enrollment in favor of awarding tenure to the professors who can't get butts in seats.
If you only care about the learning, then you could just take the incomplete. You don’t somehow lose the knowledge you gained.
The only cost of an incomplete is it doesn’t help towards a degree, but a degree is just a signaling mechanism. If you want to be able to use their degree to signal something to someone, you will have to jump through their hoops.
As AI eats up the need for half-assed "I googled a few things and wrote something up and then slacked off for five hours" white-collar-paperwork jobs, it's gonna be pretty hard for people not willing or able to demonstrate that they can do anything that couldn't just be fully done with an "agent" instead.
What is your expectation from such a class? What are you hoping to get out of it?
If you merely want a tutor that will help you out navigate a topic you are interested in, with no strings attached, then sure, yes. No need to take exams.
But if the goal is to get a formally recognized degree in some topic, then you will need to accept that there will be oversight over how you understand that topic. Because the institutions granting those degrees need to sign them off. And if they care about their reputation, they would be interested in signing off only on those students, who actually understand the topic.
So there will need to be exams. In the AI era, it is close to impossible to guarantee that a remote exam will accurately evaluate your understanding of a topic. So the exams would need to be carried out in person.
There is nothing children-specific in using such approach. It is merely one of the few still somewhat objective ways to actually test people's understanding of some topic.
You can learn remotely in his class. That's the whole point he is trying to make. Hybrid does not mean fully remote. If you want fully remote take a full remote class.
"The student is the customer" is a stupid metaphor that only caught on because a lot of people would rather just bring in dollars than worry about "are we actually teaching anything?"
Would it work in Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Utah, Nevada, Iowa, Puerto Rico, Arkensas, Kansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, DC, Vermont or Wyoming?
They all have a lower population than Denmark.
All but six states (CA, TX, FL, NY, PA, IL) have less than double the population of Denmark.
Top US universities actually have higher teacher/student ratios than top EU schools, and I wouldn't be surprised if this pattern holds in general, so it would be easier to do in the US than it is here.
The important variable is the staff/student ratio, not the size of the country. With few students per class, or many teachers, this scales fine. I'm running similar exams for my (UK) Masters modules, but colleagues are reluctant to do it for the enormous compulsory survey courses as there are several hundred students in them (vs up to about 50 in the MA ones).
Could you point out a reason why education, which can be standardized at least to a state scale¹, cannot be standardized to the state scale utilizing oral defenses? Also, can be ≠ is. Not everything is a startup lol
You said it can be fundamentally different, and of course it can. But “it doesn’t scale” isn’t an argument by itself. In many areas, scale actually creates efficiencies. You’d need to explain what specifically about the larger scale makes the Danish approach unworkable in the U.S
This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's very apparent to both student and teachers how well a topic is understood. Marks are rarely contested and in my experience most students think the process is fair.
Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....
So, I grew up in the former Soviet Union. Starting with ninth grade entrance entrance and exit exams were like that. I remember I had to take university physics exam just to be able to qualify for a consideration. It was fairly rough, but I think in a way, good system because it sifted out the wannabes early on.
Same. The focus on written exams rated blindly and uniformly at the US higher education system always puzzled me. I guess that's the only way to scale things up when you pay professors and teachers living wages?
It does indeed sound great except that everyone was corrupt to the bone
I expect a lot of the social anxiety can be mitigated by arranging things so that students get a chance to know the examiners and build a rapport with them ahead of time. (E.g., if they’re an instructor then make sure they have office hours and encourage students to go.) I’ve got my mental health challenges but that’s how things worked in my grad school and I got by just fine.
Best part you can trivially automate this using AI
>Of course, woe betide those with social phobias
I can see this being a problem in the US when it comes to "accommodations" in general. Students with an ADHD diagnosis can claim it causes just about any difficulty and get accommodations for it. The local (top ranked, but everyone's seen all the stories coming out of the Ivies...) college here gives students with ADHD double time on exams and has them take it in a special disabilities proctoring center where it's a struggle to get the staff there to even enforce those time limits. Obviously this also makes it infinitely easier to outright cheat as well.
Not a chance you will get past the "my ADHD makes it hard for me to think about these things verbally" challenge at institutions like this.
Oh, at least in the post Soviet tradition of oral exams, you are given plenty of time to think and prepare your argument before you start an actual conversation with the examining professor. And if you need to think more during the exam to answer a tricky question, the professor just shifts to talk to another student who is ready to present their case for the time being. So it is less of a public speaking and more of a conversation where you can take a pause to think through an argument, or a proof, or a problem.
as someone with ADHD who always finished exams first or was the designated spokesperson for group presentations...
I have no idea why you'd want to be taking a test a second longer than you already have to.
Either you know the material or you don't, anything taking a lot of time is borderline stuff where you're scrapping for points you might not deserve in the first place lol
> I have no idea why you'd want to be taking a test a second longer than you already have to.
The theory was that ADHD students have trouble sustaining concentration, so extra time allows for thought breaks and distractions. The idea was that 2 hours for the ADHD student would be similar to 1 hour of concentration for a non-ADHD student, and therefore the inequity had been partially compensated.
The teachers I know have the same observation that you do: The extra test time isn’t usually used by the ADHD students, but when other students (or maybe more accurately, parents) discover that extra test time was available, most of the high performing students suddenly got diagnosed with ADHD at the same time. They were the ones staying extra long to proofread their work.
For the elementary/junior high teachers I know the schools’ solution was to give everyone the same extended test taking time. Easiest way to remove the incentive to seek out a fake diagnosis without taking anything away from anyone.
ADHD is known to be able to affect speed and consistency of output, even of mastered material, and in a variety of ways -- hence "I have no idea..."
Standard diagnostic questionnaires commonly reference this. The last part of your comment reflects a lack of understanding of both human cognition and recall and ADHD in particular.
Absolutely not saying this is even the most common case but: people “without ADHD” but with a diagnosis can use the extra time effectively.
It is most clear when there is some kind of problem solving involved. An extra 30 min to figure out the trick or plan a detailed approach is a real benefit.
The other case is where there’s some missing knowledge but with a bunch of extra effort you can figure out how to do it. That would be something like re-constructing a self-balancing binary tree from some half-remembered lecture notes.
> I have no idea why you'd want to be taking a test a second longer than you already have to.
After I got treated, I understand why.
Too look for mistakes. Now I don't understand why people don't take the maximum alloted time
European universities also have accommodations and extra time etc. And yes it's an arms race. Though at some point it will simply inflate away the value of the degree, but educators will stand there baffled, not understanding how it could happen.
This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments.
But what it does threaten to do is effecting abandon all the efficiencies of the written word.
When higher education evolved into a mass system in the 1800s and into the 1900s, pure oral examination was looked at as super inefficient. A written paper could be handed in and graded without lining everyone up in front of a panel.
The oral system scales poorly. One examiner can only hear so many students in a day. There are damn good reasons Medieval universities were small and modern ones are not.
Requiring every major paper to be defended live reintroduces the bottleneck that written exams were designed to escape.
Accessibility takes a hit too. Students with speech differences, anxiety disorders, hearing impairments, or simply less fluency in the language of instruction face an extra barrier that a written submission does not impose. The written form, for all its flaws, leveled some of that ground. Shall we abandon the differently abled because machines disrupt the academic system and essentially make cheating effective?
So while it’s nice that academics are rediscovering the old ways, I don’t really see this as a scalable answer to raising education levels for the masses, but more of a knee jerk way to try to bypass the obvious technological disruption by returning to non-scalable, inaccessible ways of doing things that our ancestors abandoned for a reason.
It has its place for graduate students and smaller volume education systems. It’s fine for keeping the ivory tower clean. But it’s not the answer to expanding education to everyone and taking advantage of the technological disruption to advance education and learning throughout greater humanity, which is what AI definitely possesses as a possibility.
[delayed]
But even with the written exam, wouldn't the bottleneck still be there where the professors still need to read through all the papers? I guess its definitely more efficient and asynchronous, but I can't imagine by much assuming the same and equal rigor is applied.
Oral Defences have a long established tradition in Denmark, but recently there’s been real cut back on this as a money saving exercise. So both teachers and Students are familiar with this form of examination.
So for a dane this reads like “back to the old way”, rather than anything new or novel.
This just feels like good educational practice too? I remember really enjoying TA'ing as an undergrad for courses I took the previous year, because THAT'S when I felt I _really_ learned the material.
Likewise, when I was a lab consultant, I felt like advising others was when the concepts of Linux/systems administration _really_ sunk in.
I always crammed the bare minimum for any kind of assessment (by the end of college I was actively avoiding any classes with final exams), but when I need to be able to teach someone else or explain my understanding in a live environment? That's when I _actually_ learn.
I had to do an oral defense of my thesis in graduate school. When you've spent months and months writing something extremely obscure... well, I'd hope that it's not that difficult.
I wish we were doing this in the US even before AI was an issue. I suspect it would reorient students to their work in some pretty cool ways. I mean, it might feel like torture for some and maybe that’s not so much a bad thing. I’m sure I’m not thinking of some downsides to this too, but it seems like such a great counter against “factory” schooling. Of course, this could be a lot more work for faculty and could be hard to keep up with a huge student population. Again, maybe a feature more than a bug.
A nice plot twist would be if those tests were administered by an AI.
At some point they will have to be won't they? Too many students.
At scale, I imagine something similar to the Baseline Test in Bladerunner 2049.
My entire university education was evaluated mostly by proctored closed book exams and oral defenses. AI proof 10 years before AI.
Why is everyone in this thread comparing this to a University
But yeah, this is a good step.
Homework is also becoming obsolete at this point. If they can't do it with pen and paper in class, there's no reliable way to evaluate work anymore.
I'm teaching a university math course next semester and I've been messing around with a solution to this that my old analysis professor used to employ. Every week, they take home a handful of theory questions. These aren't turned in for credit. But, every week, there'll be a short quiz where one of those questions are asked verbatim, along with a small follow up.
That felt like a very natural solution to me. Of course, worst case scenario, they just blindly generate and memorize the proofs without thinking. But I think the follow ups will catch them in that case. Moreover, I choose to believe that >90% of my students are willing to at least put in the work of scrutinizing those proofs which is honestly not bad exercise in its own right.
I would love to do oral exams directly, the logistics with the number of students I have just make that hard. I know we're trialing it with the less populated special topics courses.
This is the way
I find it quite surprising that Danish high school students (the article isn't about university) apparently did write digital exams with internet access until now, so basically open book.
I'm also surprised. In Portugal primary, middle and high school tests and exams are all proctored and the vast majority of them written by hand.
Oral exams were the norm when I studied. Even for technical topics.
The more I read about articles like these, I grow even more convinced that the education industry as a whole, regardless of the country or stature, has kind of lost their plot.
Sometimes I even wonder if this is the outcome of sheer laziness, fear or both.
When I speak to professors, teachers and students - It's also surprising that "top tier" institutions are fighting AI harder (outside extremely specific courses like Harvard’s flagship CS50, MBA courses at Wharton (UPenn) and MIT) while "bottom tier" institutions are completely embracing it and rebuilding their curriculum around it. One CS professor at a "bottom tier" CSU mentioned to me that he's actively going completely "open book using AI" - students are allowed to use anything they want from Claude to Codex to OpenCode to finish assignments but the assignments have now changed from "blurt out quicksort" to "let's sort N natural numbers in a cache efficient way using least amount of resources". I would hire the latter over the former anytime. I am tired of interviewing candidates who can shit out quicksort before I can even finish my sentence but stare at me dumbfounded when I ask them to sort people's name serialized in unicode.
In my opinion, the bulk of traditional education has been a mix of memorization of facts, knowing inference rules, and applying inference rules to those facts, coupled with recall.
Before the age of LLMs, only very expensive-to-build rule-based expert systems were able to replicate that functionality. Humans were just simply cheaper and way more reliable.
In 2026, Frontier models are exceedingly, across the board, across industries, breaking records and challenging those notions on cost, capability and sophistication.
Trying to replicate how education used to operate pre-frontier LLMs is like forcing people to farm by hand in the age of automated tractors that have LIDAR, Vision, RTK on board.
I'm not discounting other elements of learning like collaborative debate, clinical/lab work, Socratic reasoning, emotional intelligence and the development of a professional network - but I argue these skills are not limited to a school or university setting. Infact, a lot of this is distorted in a school or university setting compared to the real world.
I have been filing my own taxes, including complexities like equity, real estate and business income for over a decade now, so it's not just a simple 1040 and 540. Reading through IRS documentation, talking to EAs and CPAs to fill in ambiguities and gaps was pretty expensive in terms of time and money.
Both Claude Opus and GPT 5.5 now, as of 2026, answer all my tax questions correctly. Those thousands of dollars in time and money I had spent has been replaced by a single $20 subscription. Unless tax codes drastically change every year, that $20 is a one time cost.
If I were to begin my tax journey in 2026, I would never had to spend those dollars: dozens of tax professionals are out of a job - all their education is for nothing.
It's entirely irrelevant whether they passed their exams by carving answers out on granite, taking their exams in a jail cell on an island proctored by Catholic Nuns under the watchful guard of automatic machine guns manned by T-1000s, I just don't need them anymore. For my usecase, these humans and their credentials provide 0 additional value over a one-time $20 expense, no matter how complicated it was for them to get their credential.
All this "reject AI, do it by hand" is just insanity at worst and laziness at best.
That said, I'm personally unsure what the future of education in the age of tractors is like but removing weeds, planting seeds, watering them, all by hand is certainly not it.
It's my understanding that most countries - developed or developing - are bottlenecked on educating their masses due to lack of qualified teachers.
That's a bandwidth problem. Having those teachers listen to oral arguments from a handful of students is not solving the core bandwidth problem. All these shenanigans is doing a disservice to the public.
Depends on what skills you want the students to have.
In e.g., philosophy, allowing students to write their assessments with the help of LLMs changes the students’ depth of understanding, as well as their ability to synthesize, formalize, and drum up their own arguments and objections.
These are all useful skills, even in a post-LLM world.
This is great. Sorry, but the Western World has to stop normalizing extreme introvertism. Humans are social. We rely on communication and cooperation to survive. Allowing kids to shelter themselves from interaction and communication during crucial development stages will only hamper them in life.
This is a nightmare for students that don't think on their feet.
This is definitely something you can't force onto students on a whim. This is a something that can be taught and worked up to though.
Can you explain why? As I understand it, you're supposed to be able to talk about the work in which you already invested the mental energy to write. Writing involves much more "brain work" than speaking, so if you've truly written the work in question, you should be capable of speaking about it -- unless you have some sort of disability, in which case, there are probably alternative avenues.
Yeah as much as I like the idea, I know there will be some brilliant and driven students who would have a hard time with this due to temperament. For me, if I’m excited about something, I can talk for hours. Maybe not so for everyone though. Then again, not all brilliant and driven students test well either, so… pick your poison?
This is a good move. I teach a summer async remote course that's ending next week, but I'm giving all the students incompletes until they come back to campus and take an in-person exam the first week of classes. All homework is worth a marginal amount, and if they fail the final they fail the class.
I'm not going to spend my effort policing whether they're using AI or not in their class work because it's a losing battle. At the end of the day, they can either demonstrate mastery of the material at an exam or not. It makes the exams higher stakes, but that's where we are.
I hope at least the homework is good prep for the exams, otherwise if its grade value is marginal there's little point from the PoV of a student that just needs to pass the class to take it seriously
I'd never pay to have you as a teacher, I'm sorry. Maybe your move makes a sense for the reputation of your university's degree, but as a student willing to pay to learn remotely, I'd not accept to be treated like children.
Regular graded assignments is the "treated like children" version. The adult treatment is that you can come to class if you want, you can do the assignments if you want, but if not, that's fine too. There is one test at the end, and it's your responsibility to prepare for it as you want. You manage your own time, we offer consultation, lectures, assignments, tutorials etc. but you can reject all of this and learn the material from some other textbook, and as long as you've mastered the material, you'll get a good grade at the exam. This is how German universities work, for the most part.
The problem is the vicious feedback nowadays of online student evaluations of professors. Professors that are rigorous get complaints and low rankings, kids don't sign up for their sections etc. Kids (parents) pay the administration and the administration wants to keep the customer happy. The only real answer are standardized exams (such as licensure exams) which are beyond parent pocketbook capture.
Or like Europe. You don't pay tuition, but if you slack off, and don't progress properly, you only have a limited number of exam retries and limited number of funded semesters. If you fail, you're out, choose another profession. You're not a customer, you're someone who is trying to prove themselves and get certified by experts on their knowledge. The "customer" of the university is whoever will glance at the degree paper and tries to ascertain the skill/knowledge level of the outgoing student. They have to give a good signal there. The reason this doesn't work in the US, is because they want mediocre children of rich parents to be pushed through, because college is a networking and social class-based finishing school, not a place for acquiring knowledge.
(Also, there should be electives, but the rigorous backbone of a degree should be mandatory, so "students won't choose this course" doesn't come up.)
> The reason this doesn't work in the US, is because they want mediocre children of rich parents to be pushed through, because college is a networking and social class-based finishing school, not a place for acquiring knowledge.
Out of curiosity, which US university did you attend? I went to a well-known and highly-regarded public university in California, and they absolutely did not coddle their students. Poor-performing students regularly washed out.
None, but have interacted with American students at European universities and they were very lost without all the coddling and all kinds of support infrastructure and basically getting their life organized by administrators who personally attended to their matters and reminded them a million times about deadlines and so on. They were unprepared for actually having to manage their own studies, read up on rules, find out where to register for something, until when, etc. etc.
That happens when American students first join US universities too. It takes a few weeks for freshmen to get acquainted with the new reality of being completely responsible for handling their affairs and ensuring their success. It’s nothing to slam them about; that’s an artifact of coming from a system that provides more guide rails during primary education and childhood than European children might enjoy.
Tenure protects professors against students' complaints (often for the better, sometimes for the worse). Also, the administration already knows that students complain about professors who are tough, and don't typically pay heed to those complaints. Parents don't really have recourse either: what are they going to do, send their kid to Podunk State instead?
Yes indeed. College departments are well-known for cutting the ranks of the professors who have proven track records of boosting enrollment in favor of awarding tenure to the professors who can't get butts in seats.
I don’t think you understand how universities work. Which US university did you attend?
If you only care about the learning, then you could just take the incomplete. You don’t somehow lose the knowledge you gained.
The only cost of an incomplete is it doesn’t help towards a degree, but a degree is just a signaling mechanism. If you want to be able to use their degree to signal something to someone, you will have to jump through their hoops.
Adults don't have to prove things?
As AI eats up the need for half-assed "I googled a few things and wrote something up and then slacked off for five hours" white-collar-paperwork jobs, it's gonna be pretty hard for people not willing or able to demonstrate that they can do anything that couldn't just be fully done with an "agent" instead.
> I'd not accept to be treated like children.
What is your expectation from such a class? What are you hoping to get out of it?
If you merely want a tutor that will help you out navigate a topic you are interested in, with no strings attached, then sure, yes. No need to take exams.
But if the goal is to get a formally recognized degree in some topic, then you will need to accept that there will be oversight over how you understand that topic. Because the institutions granting those degrees need to sign them off. And if they care about their reputation, they would be interested in signing off only on those students, who actually understand the topic.
So there will need to be exams. In the AI era, it is close to impossible to guarantee that a remote exam will accurately evaluate your understanding of a topic. So the exams would need to be carried out in person.
There is nothing children-specific in using such approach. It is merely one of the few still somewhat objective ways to actually test people's understanding of some topic.
Do you think 'At the end of the day, they can either demonstrate mastery of the material at an exam or not' is a reasonable expectation for an adult?
If so, how would an adult be treated while still expecting them to demonstrate mastery?
If not, what do you think a reasonable expectation for an adult should be?
You can learn remotely in his class. That's the whole point he is trying to make. Hybrid does not mean fully remote. If you want fully remote take a full remote class.
Are you after learning or an accredited degree?
Are you willing to pay to learn remotely from a university with crappy reputation?
Well that's part of the issue with for profit education, if the student pays significant money for tuition, is he a customer or a student?
"The student is the customer" is a stupid metaphor that only caught on because a lot of people would rather just bring in dollars than worry about "are we actually teaching anything?"
It's not a metaphor. They are literally the customer.
They're a customer in the same way that a martial arts student is a customer: getting your butt kicked is literally what you're paying for.
Denmark is a very small country and what works there doesn’t necessarily work at the scale of the US or China.
Would it work in Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oregon, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Utah, Nevada, Iowa, Puerto Rico, Arkensas, Kansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, DC, Vermont or Wyoming?
They all have a lower population than Denmark.
All but six states (CA, TX, FL, NY, PA, IL) have less than double the population of Denmark.
Top US universities actually have higher teacher/student ratios than top EU schools, and I wouldn't be surprised if this pattern holds in general, so it would be easier to do in the US than it is here.
This is about Danish high school exams.
Oh, in that case it is actually flipped.
Piling on. Why? Are class sizes that different? US and China have many more professors too, is it not proportional?
The US consists of many small parts too, and it may work in each of those small parts.
The important variable is the staff/student ratio, not the size of the country. With few students per class, or many teachers, this scales fine. I'm running similar exams for my (UK) Masters modules, but colleagues are reluctant to do it for the enormous compulsory survey courses as there are several hundred students in them (vs up to about 50 in the MA ones).
Why not? This is such a thought terminating statement. No actual reason.
Tell me you're not a programmer w/o telling me. What works at scale can be fundamentally different than what works in a small startup (Denmark).
Could you point out a reason why education, which can be standardized at least to a state scale¹, cannot be standardized to the state scale utilizing oral defenses? Also, can be ≠ is. Not everything is a startup lol
¹https://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/
You said it can be fundamentally different, and of course it can. But “it doesn’t scale” isn’t an argument by itself. In many areas, scale actually creates efficiencies. You’d need to explain what specifically about the larger scale makes the Danish approach unworkable in the U.S
If in person exams are seemingly impossible in US due to scale, we have to conclude that before internet US had no education?
For parallelizable workloads it scales just fine, and giving exams is perfectly parallelizable. Any good programmer would know that.