Wyoming and Penn Professors Turn to Oral Exams as Generative AI Reshapes Assessment

eSchool News reported on September 18, 2026 that Catherine Hartmann, a professor at the University of Wyoming, redesigned her upper-level humanities course around oral assessment after a 2023 assignment in a history of meditation course came back with a copy-pasted AI prompt left at the top. Students practiced discussion and oral explanation throughout the semester, and the final oral exam became the culmination of that work. At the University of Pennsylvania, mathematics professor Robin Pemantle has students work calculus problems at the board while explaining their reasoning aloud.

Generative AI makes take-home writing hard to treat on its own as evidence that a student has read, analyzed and understood the material, so educators need ways to observe thinking directly. Bringing back oral exams changes class time, teacher workload and student evaluation criteria, and it can risk confusing language expression with subject knowledge for multilingual learners, which is why scaffolded, low-stakes practice matters. The report provides no quantitative results on how oral exams affect student grades or learning outcomes. University courses may add oral explanation and live reasoning components, requiring teachers to build low-stakes practice into the semester rather than only testing at the end. Multilingual learners may be misread as lacking subject knowledge because of accent, vocabulary retrieval or extra processing time, so assessment fairness needs deliberate design.