Oral exam
educational assessment where questions are asked and answered verbally
The oral exam (also oral test or viva voce; Rigorosum in German-speaking nations) is a practice in many schools and disciplines in which an examiner poses questions to the student in spoken form. The student has to answer the question in such a way as to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of the subject to pass the exam. The oral exam also helps reduce (although it does not eliminate) the risk of granting a degree to a candidate who has had the thesis or dissertation ghostwritten by an expert.
Overview
Many science programs require students pursuing a bachelor's degree to finish the program by taking an oral exam or a combination of oral and written exams to show how well a student has understood the material studied in the program. Usually, study guides or a syllabus are made available so that the students may prepare for the exam by reviewing practice questions and topics likely to be on the exam. There is a small but growing body of literature on the use of oral examinations in undergraduate education in the English speaking world.
Some medical schools use oral exams for second and third year students to test knowledge but also the ability to respond on the spot. Students are required to take an oral exam prior to being awarded a PhD. Some universities allow the option of either taking written and oral exams or completing a project or thesis, but occasionally, all three are required for graduation. Oral exams are distinct from a defense of a thesis in that the questions in the latter are more narrow and specific to the topic of the thesis.
Graduate students are sometimes allowed to choose their examiners for oral exams.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Oral exam” as educational assessment where questions are asked and answered verbally. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oral exam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.