Mini homework defenses: short oral one-on-one assessments of student solutions¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

A formative oral assessment structure shared by a faculty member in Electricity and Magnetism 2: "short booked appointments in which a Learning Assistant randomly selects one of the student's completed homework problems, the student prepares briefly and then presents and is questioned on their own solution, receiving an immediate pass/fail score." The structure makes student reasoning visible and was presented as an AI-resistant assessment option. Several faculty expressed interest in and implemented oral assessments afterward.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Learning Assistants or graders to run appointments, plus timing, rubrics, and student guidelines

Constraints¶

• Faculty saw oral defenses as valuable but labor-intensive

Target Learners¶

• Junior-level undergraduate physics students

Target Learning Goals¶

• Making student reasoning visible and assessing authentic problem-solving in an AI-resistant format

Related Strategies¶

• Pair AI-permitted take-home assignments with supervised modifications, oral defense, prediction, and transfer tasks to verify understanding
• Use weekly oral code review interviews to incentivize students to understand AI-assisted code
• Two-instrument assessment: AI-free coding quizzes plus verification-gated oral defenses of comment-stripped AI-assisted work

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Perl-Nussbaum, D., & Finkelstein, N. D. (2026). A Workshop Series for Effective Use of AI in Uncertain Times: Building a Physics Faculty Learning Community. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23887. doi:10.48550/arxiv.2609.23887