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Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....
as a side note, "woe betide you" roughly means "you're in for a very bad time", not "I feel sorry for you".
The professors at my grad school had a very amazing tact to get through this as well. They had enough time for specific students who they knew struggled with such issues during the mid semester orals and then had an amazing way of getting answers from them even in the discomfort.
It is amazing how much can be done with soft talking, slow progression and pauses in between from professors who care.
True but maybe a blessing in disguise. As a shy college kid once (although not with any real disability), being forced to get up in front of people helped me get over it. And I was 10x better after a semester of teaching during a break in my career.
This is also an absolutely great way to ensure the participants really understand what they’re saying, even aside from ai-related concerns. You could always pull definitions straight from textbooks, and write something which mostly makes sense but that you don’t really understand. But you really can’t teach something unless you do understand it, imo. The best command I ever got on a topic was due to TA’ing
The professor (strict uncompromising man hated by most of the class) then remarked, "now I see you really figured it out".
That's not my experience. Standing in front of somebody who's been your teacher and you might look up to is way scarier than some rando.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
But what it does threaten to do is effectively 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? This does not seem very logical, or sensitive.
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.
The appeal of digital systems, at a social level, is that they can transmit information accurately for almost no marginal cost. They come at the risk of fraud.
With AI the levels of risk have increased. Anyone can now be a fraudster, and it gets harder and harder to prove anything online. Either of us two, in this conversation, could be a well tuned LLM.
So society, collectively and at an individual level, is forced to reassess reliance on purely digital information. Which means that the advances in the technology, actually end up reducing the utility of digital systems more generally.
You can argue that this makes education costly and less accessible. It does. It absolutely does. There is also no alternative except to see higher education get wiped out, which would have devastating economic and social effects.
So we are going back to blue books and vivas.
In Hungary it's a pipeline. You go in a room, you pick a piece of paper out of a hat, which gives you some task or topic to prepare for. Then you sit down at a desk (the room is filled with about 15 students working already), then you solve the problem or sketch out your notes to present the topic you picked for like 20 minutes, then you go to the professor and you have to, in low voice, explain your solution, the professor asks back and pokes at it to make sure you understand. The professor then gives a grade immediately and you go home.
In Germany, it's usually no random pick of a topic, you just go through the entire semester's material over 30-45 minutes and the professor stops to spend more or less time on each topic to explore your knowledge. You can explain things by making sketches on paper. A PhD student sits there quietly taking notes of what was asked and what the student answers approximately. You leave the room, the prof and the PhD student discuss the performance, decide the grade and you come back, and the professor explains the grade and what you did well and not well.
With an oral exam, the prof blocks off 3 days or so, with ~8 students per day and it's done. It's not a huge additional effort compared to all the effort of giving the course over the full semester anyway.
An added, though minor benefit is that the professor might decide to offer a student assistant job to someone who performs well, because it's much easier to judge who is actually good in an oral exam vs in written. There's a reason that job interviews aren't just tests filled out on paper but involve personal interactions.
Universities in the US charge fortunes and pay instructors a pittance while plowing ever more money into “administrators”. Fire half the administrators and hire more instructors to both proctor exams and give more personalized instruction.
Universities are entirely elective, why would they need to cater specifically to disabilities? Driving schools don't make exceptions for the blind. There are skills that people expect you to have with a certain kind of diploma, and it reflects poorly on the school if they don't have a standard to hold people to. Not being able to present your work in a basic way is one of those mandatory skills that imo makes you unqualified to graduate if you don't grasp it.
I'm not saying you can't make an exception for a person or two who is clearly as good or better than the rest otherwise, but people will always try to misuse as many exceptions as they can, en masse, as an excuse to just avoid doing required work.
It doesn't feel good, but at some point we have to ask, can we support every single case, at the expense of the whole? I'd like to be convinced that's not a necessary tradeoff
So for a dane this reads like “back to the old way”, rather than anything new or novel.
A fun anecdote from my defense was that this element of logic "did not exist before some time" or something.
One of my citations was a book from like, the 1700's or something, and it absolutely blew away one of the committee members that I'd found it. He asked me "how on earth did you find this reference?" and I just told him that I look at all the math/logic libraries in Boston I had access to, I looked up all their logic books that predated the cut off I was looking for, and I skimmed them.
I didn't even have to leave my university's library, because one of the first five books had the counter-factual I was looking for. Sure, it was a rare book and I had read it in a special room, but it wasn't particularly hard to find.
Before that defense, I was 100% the only person alive with that information.
In the long run, in the AGI world, if everyone has implants, then everyone is roughly equal because computer-aided computation will be better than what any individual can do. Those without implants are screwed.
(I don't want an implant; nor do I want others to have implants.)
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.
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.
But worthless for assessments and assigning grades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matura#Italy
It's time consuming and nerve-wracking, but it feels fair.
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.
At scale, I imagine something similar to the Baseline Test in Bladerunner 2049.
It is also often the case for exams in majors (they are often oral).
So nothing innovative there
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.
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.
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?
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 and what complex interpretive dance they had to do to impress the people awarding their grades.
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.
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.
indeed but LLMs improve these capabilities. Let me explain:
Most educators behave as if using an LLM robs the student of their ability to think. That has not and never been my experience.
You can just tell an LLM to debate, find out inconsistencies and issues in your writing, and challenge you, and it will very well do that!
LLMs for me, cheaply replace teachers who can barely be accessed during office hours because they are so busy doing research or overwhelmed with grading coursework.
In a typical educational setup, I might have half an hour at best with a teacher who looks kindly upon me, and at worst, five minutes with a teacher who doesn't like being around me. An LLM has no emotion, but it has knowledge, it has inference rules, and it has the ability to push back, debate, and find out inconsistencies, bugs and gaps in my thinking.
Behavior that is exactly what I need consistently, in a good teacher.
A frontier LLM is a good teacher who doesn't play games, has no emotion, infinite patience and always available for $20/mo.
There are two kinds of engineers in Finland. Some received a more theoretical education at research universities. Most went to more applied institutions that focus more on practical skills. Regardless of what employers say, they generally prefer the theoretical engineers from research universities. Because the higher status of those universities attracts more talented individuals, because theoretical understanding tends to stay valid longer than practical skills, and because it's easier to learn practical skills at work.
The kids who start their studies today are supposed to graduate in 2030, and they will probably retire around 2080. Focusing too much on the skills their early employers might want in the 2030s would be a huge misallocation of resources.
These are important skills to develop, even in a world with LLMs.
> All this "reject AI, do it by hand" is just insanity at worst and laziness at best.
If a 3rd grader complained about having to learn multiplication because calculators exist, would you agree with them?
Why do we make kids learn how to do math if they can pull out their phone and open the calculator app? Because learning how to learn is important and there is value in understanding how the answer is produced, even if you have a machine that can produce it for you.
Universities can teach a separate class on how to use LLMs. The existing classes should be focused on teaching their existing subject matter, not becoming an extension of a how-to-LLM class
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.
¹https://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/