Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

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....

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 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.

I'm quite impressed with the Hungarian system, for 18-19 year old school leavers, where every subject is split 50/50 between:

  - Írásbeli (written) - standardised written exam, centrally set and marked
  - Szóbeli (oral) - the panel interview

  - A committee of 2-3 teachers sits as a panel
  - The student draws a topic at random from a list
  - They get prep time (usually 15-20 mins)
  - They present their answer to the panel
  - The panel asks follow-up questions and probes understanding

As an educator myself, this quarter for the first time for my course's final project, I've switched to actually asking my students to provide an "AI Authenticity Audit" of their (project-relevant) chats in the construction of said projects. All my students' output over the last two years went from pre-AI level quality to boardroom-ready polish, and I'm actually more interested to see how they arrive at an outcome rather than the final output itself - focusing on their questioning, curating, editing, and iterating process. Didn't think we'd get to somewhere like this so soon, but here we are. Strange, but I'm trying it out.

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.

Good to see.

Related, I've moved to requiring regular in-class handwritten quizzes. Just a blank piece of paper to start, with the questions on the board. The practice forces students to recognize whether they are learning specific topics.

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.

In my high school English class (like 10 years ago) my teacher assigned readings and called on a random person each day to give an overview of a section. He basically quizzed you in front of the class on themes, plots, etc. It was very effective at getting me to read and care for that class, because if you just sat up there and didn't know anything you'd lose marks on participation (and look kind of dumb). Not sure if/when/why oral presentations and public speaking are no longer got prioritized.

In my uni years bachelors, masters and PhDs required thorough research resulting in a huge opus printed and stitched together but the only thing that really mattered was the presentation of the work in front of the committee and oral defenses. To this day I have been living in full confidence that this is the academic standard that has been in place and effective (with variations) over centuries, if not millenias…

Even intermediate exams were a combinations of practical work in some written form and the theoretical grill sessions in the end of every semester.

All in all, if I had to put a professor’s hat today I would not give a sh.. if my students would use LLMs to write text. What would matter (and what does for me as a hiring manager at $WORK) and a human being with decency is the results of the _natural neural network_ training so to speak. IF whatever prompts and interactions with LLMs result in sharp knowledge of the subject and ability to apply the knowledge to solving real problems, well done and congrats!

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.

It was already long-standing practice, when I was teaching many many years ago, to interview suspected cheaters (it's usually quite obvious) to see if they actually knew what they claimed they knew.

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.

This is how we used to grade labs when I was a TA in college. Students worked in groups of two and showed up with a working project to get graded. Afterwards, we'd ask the two students questions and it was extremely obvious if one or both of them didn't work on it.

My entire university education was evaluated mostly by proctored closed book exams and oral defenses. AI proof 10 years before AI.

The Conversation has an article that supports raising expectations for students, given that they have access to AI

https://theconversation.com/mit-researchers-say-using-chatgp...

It feels like systems like the Maturita' final multi-day exam in Italy do a pretty good job at providing students with a standardized, state-supervised process for demonstrating one's competence by the end of high school. No computers, you're under the watchful eye of your teachers the whole time, nobody knows what's going to be on the exam until the day of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matura#Italy

It's time consuming and nerve-wracking, but it feels fair.

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.

Oral exams were the norm when I studied. Even for technical topics.

This is a great strategy. It is something I do in code reviews as a senior developer. There has been observed longer code reviews for seniors and this kind of approach keeps it manageable.

I’ve studied CS in Italy and most if not all exams were both written and oral some also had labs. I thought it was the same for other degrees too.

Couldn't students ask AI to make a oral defense plan?

As a thought experiment: In-person testing or oral defense approaches work until we get implants. If people have implants, what then? Demand that the implant be turned off? Demand that the implant's data connection be turned off? In the latter case, the person with more storage or a better local model wins.

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.)

Watching tech cannibalize itself is about as entertaining as watching Hollywood do it in the mid-2000s.

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 mean, this is pretty much the easiest way of handling the problem.

When I was teaching in a university the easiest thing to test someone's understanding was a simple question: "Explain me how would you use this in a day-to-day situation."

If the guy knows his business, he'll go on a long lecture obsessing over every new feature of C# 2.0 or PHP 3. He would give you all the differences between Firefox 3.5.1 and IE 6 with Maxthon. (Goddamn I'm freaking old)

Should you not find a spark of interest but just random mumbo-jumbo of words that don't constitute sentences, you can clearly see that there is no understanding present in the subject.

In this case you work as a teacher, helping the guy to figure out what he does not understand in a subject and simplifying things for him till this clicks. After that he will be able to talk about said subject for hours with gusto.

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.

One step closer to mentats.

A nice plot twist would be if those tests were administered by an AI.

That's going to be a hard test. Have you ever heard Danish?

In slovenia, at least in most engineering colleges, every exam was a combination of written + oral, way before AI even existed.

This is and have always been the case for Masters and above across Europe. It varies for Licentiates.

It is also often the case for exams in majors (they are often oral).

So nothing innovative there

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.

Denmark: "You must now verbally defend your essay." Students: sweating nervously "Uh, well, you see... the AI wrote it, but I agree with what it said?"

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 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.

This is the way

Denmark is a very small country and what works there doesn’t necessarily work at the scale of the US or China.

This is a nightmare for students that don't think on their feet.

Millions of students are now donating to neuralink so they can have stealth LLM answers on the fly. Teachers will have to count the number of load bearing per paragraph.