It appears that the academy is so concerned about students using "Clippy on Steroids" that they are returning to oral exams.
Nice to see the hallowed halls of academia running scared:
When the pandemic closed classrooms in March of 2020 and forced remote teaching, a top engineering student at the University of California, San Diego, anxiously expressed concern to a professor that her classmates would cheat, bend the class curve and lower her grade.
Prof. Huihui Qi considered the dilemma and introduced a testing method with a 2,000-year-old record that is today largely ignored: oral exams.
“The students were nervous,” Qi said. “None of them had taken exams like this before.”
That initiative led to a three-year research experiment which has now stretched across 7,000 oral exams. It comes as a wave of professors around the world are experimenting with oral exams to improve teaching and learning and to discourage cheating.
Qi believes the exams can push students past rote memorization, prompt them to think on their feet and reveal a student’s conceptual understanding of the subject matter better than most written exams. They are also very hard to hack.
They have one downside though, they are much harder to fob off on graduate teaching assistants, so the professors have to work harder.
Seems like a win-win to me, though I am sure that Professors frantically looking to publish papers in order to preserve their careers might disagree.
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