Hi, former student with social phobia and terrified of public speaking.

Today: adult with no problems doing public speaking in front of hundreds.

What fixed me: more public speaking and not having the option of avoiding the task.

I have always disliked public speaking and oral defense since I was a child, to the point of fairly profound anxiety. But please withhold you woe—these people are, as I am today, adults. Masters students. Coddling them and holding low expectations has proven to be a sort of “killing them with kindness” approach to handling modern youth. People need to be encouraged (and required) to do things they don’t like to become proper functioning adults. I didnt like it, and I still don’t, as it the case with most everyone. But we all grow from it.

Clarification for non-Danes: this post is not entirely accurate. Not all Master's courses in Denmark have oral examinations, and many courses before the Master's level (including elementary school) have oral exams. It is unrelated to the academic level, and instead related to the academic discipline and the size of the course. The latter is in my experience the main constraint, as oral exams are difficult to scale. They usually take 20-30 minutes per student, and if you have a course with 200 students, well, you're in for a long time.

The oral exam format described is also somewhat unusual, in my experience. It is usually the case that there is one internal examiner and one external examiner in the room. More than that would be ruinously expensive. The format varies; usually it's a combination of a short presentation and questions asked by the examiner. Drawing a random topic is very common.

Source: I am a university teacher in Denmark who teaches master-level courses without oral exams, and I have been an examiner for many oral exams at university level.

64 year old nerd with social phobias here. When I was in school, I had to practice oral knowledge tests since grade one. I had my first oral exam in grade six (math) and 2-3 oral exams every year since then. If I hadn't had that experience, I would never have gotten into university. I still don't like verbal communications with people (especially in a tense situations like exam), I'm slow etc, but it's manageable because I had to practice it a lot. I don't think I would have survived in modern "the environment must be made suitable for everyone" school/university.

> Of course, woe betide those with social phobias...

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.

>>> Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....

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.

So, I grew up in the former Soviet Union. Starting with ninth grade entrance entrance and exit exams were like that. I remember I had to take university physics exam just to be able to qualify for a consideration. It was fairly rough, but I think in a way, good system because it sifted out the wannabes early on.

> 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)

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

This is not general to all subjects in Danish universities. I studied physics in Denmark and while the majority of my exams after the second year match this description (though not all), my impression is that this is not at all the norm. Students in the humanities in my dorm, for example, seemed to have an overwhelming majority of several-day take-home written exams (with no associated oral defense).

I expect a lot of the social anxiety can be mitigated by arranging things so that students get a chance to know the examiners and build a rapport with them ahead of time. (E.g., if they’re an instructor then make sure they have office hours and encourage students to go.) I’ve got my mental health challenges but that’s how things worked in my grad school and I got by just fine.

That’s not entirely true. It varies from master’s programme to master’s programme even inside the same Danish university. Assessment is defined by the corresponding programme board.

Thesis/dissertations do have to be defended, but for course assessment that is not a given.

(I run a course and teach as well on other Master programmes.)

If you want to be an adult functioning in society, being able to briefly talk about your ideas with strangers is important.

That's how my school did it even for high school courses. End of the year exams were infront of the committee. Same thing, you pull a ticket and have few minutes to prepare the answer. I aced physics course, that was a proud moment but credits didnt transfer when we moved overseas...

This is also the case for many graduate programs in the US as well, but what this article is suggesting is that there are now specific oral exams to defend a student's paper, not just general oral exams.

that's interesting, i do something similar when helping my 16 year old with his homework. I ask him to teach me the topic first (it's been a while since i took physics and calc hah). By the time he's able to answer my questions so that i can help him then he's answered his own questions pretty much.

I do this at work too. When doing code review i actually do mostly listening and then some questions. If the developer can teach me the code and i understand what they're doing and why then it's usually pretty good code already.

This is truly awesome and fantastic, and I hope it becomes a thing all around the world.

>Of course, woe betide those with social phobias

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.

Welcome to the real world. One cannot be coddled forever.

Best part you can trivially automate this using AI

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