Posted by sethbannon 1/2/2026
CFR 46.104 (Exempt Research):
46.104.d.1 "Research, conducted in established or commonly accepted educational settings, that specifically involves normal educational practices that are not likely to adversely impact students' opportunity to learn required educational content or the assessment of educators who provide instruction. This includes most research on regular and special education instructional strategies, and research on the effectiveness of or the comparison among instructional techniques, curricula, or classroom management methods."
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/subtitle-A/subchapter-...
So while this may have been a dick move by the instructors, it was probably legal.
> Exempt human subjects research is a specific sub-set of “research involving human subjects” that does not require ongoing IRB oversight. Research can qualify for an exemption if it is no more than minimal risk and all of the research procedures fit within one or more of the exemption categories in the federal IRB regulations. *Studies that qualify for exemption must be submitted to the IRB for review before starting the research. Pursuant to NU policy, investigators do not make their own determination as to whether a research study qualifies for an exemption — the IRB issues exemption determinations.* There is not a separate IRB application form for studies that could qualify for exemption – the appropriate protocol template for human subjects research should be filled out and submitted to the IRB in the eIRB+ system.
Most of my research is in CS Education, and I have often been able to get my studies under the Exempt status. This makes my life easier, but it's still a long arduous paperwork process. Often there are a few rounds to get the protocol right. I usually have to plan studies a whole semester in advance. The IRB does NOT like it when you decide, "Hey I just realized I collected a bunch of data, I wonder what I can do with it?" They want you to have a plan going in.
[1] https://irb.northwestern.edu/submitting-to-the-irb/types-of-...
Imagine otherwise: a teacher who wants change their final exam from a 50 item Scantron using A-D choices, to a 50 item Scantron using A-E choices, because they think having 5 choices per item is better than 4, would need to ask for IRB approval. That's not feasible, and is not what happens in the real world of academia.
It is true that local IRBs may try to add additional rules, but the NU policy you quote talks about "studies". Most IRBs would disagree that "professor playing around with grading procedures and policies" constitutes a "study".
It would be presumed exempted.
Are you a teacher or a student? If you are a teacher, you have wide latitude that a student researcher does not.
Also, if you are a teacher, doing "research about your teaching style", that's exempted.
By contrast, if you are a student, or a teacher "doing research" that's probably not exempt and must go through IRB.
Reminder: This professor's school costs $90k a year, with over $200k total cost to get an MBA. If that tuition isn't going down because the professor cut corners to do an oral exam of ~35 students for literally less than a dollar each, then this is nothing more than a professor valuing getting to slack off higher than they value your education.
>And here is the delicious part: you can give the whole setup to the students and let them prepare for the exam by practicing it multiple times. Unlike traditional exams, where leaked questions are a disaster, here the questions are generated fresh each time. The more you practice, the better you get. That is... actually how learning is supposed to work.
No, students are supposed to learn the material and have an exam that fairly evaluates this. Anyone who has spent time on those old terrible online physics coursework sites like Mastering Physics understands that grinding away practicing exams doesn't improve your understanding of the material; it just improves your ability to pass the arbitrary evaluation criteria. It's the same with practicing leetcode before interviews. Doing yet another dynamic programming practice problem doesn't really make you a better SWE.
Minmaxing grades and other external rewards is how we got to the place we're at now. Please stop enshittifying education further.
Also, with all the progress in video gen, what does recording the webcam really do?
Ask about any teacher, scalability is a serious issue. Students being in classes above and under their level is a serious issue. non-interactive learning, leading to rote memorization, as a result of having to choose scaling methods of learning is a serious issue. All these can be adjusted to a personal level through AI, it's trivial to do so, even.
I'm definitely not sold on the idea of oral exams through AI though. I don't even see the point, exams themselves are specifically an analysis of knowledge at one point in time. Far from ideal, we just never got anything better, how else can you measure a student's worth?
Well, now you could just run all of that student's activity in class through that AI. In the real world you don't know if someone is competent because you run an exam, you know if he is competent because he consistently shows competency. Exams are a proxy for that, you can't have a teacher looking at a student 24/7 to see they know their stuff, except now you can gather the data and parse it, what do I care if a student performs 10 exercises poorly in a specific day at a specific time if they have shown they can do perfectly well, as can be ascertained by their performance the past week?
But isn’t the whole point of a class to move from incompetent to competent?
Isn’t the poor performance on those exercises also part of their overall performance? Do you mean just that their positive work outweighs the bad work?
This sounds as though it was written by an LLM too.
On the other hand, can an AI exam really simulate the conditions necessary for improving at this skill? I think this is unlikely. The students' responses indicate not a general lack of expertise in oral communication but also a discomfort with this particular environment. While the author is making steps to improve the environment, I think it is fundamentally too different from actual human-to-human discussion to test a student's ability in oral communication. Even if a student could learn to succeed in this environment, it won't produce much improvement in their real world ability.
But maybe that's not the goal, and it's simply to test understanding. Well, as other commenters have stated, this seems trivially cheatable. So it neither succeeds at improving one's ability in oral communication nor at testing understanding. Other solutions have to be thought of.
LLM oral exams can provide assessment in a student's native language. This can be very important in some scenarios!
Unlimited attempts won't work in the presented model. No matter how many cases you have, all will eventually find their way to the various cheating sites.
There is no silver bullet. There's no solution that works for all schools. Strategies that work well for M.I.T. with competitive enrollment and large budgets won't work for a small community college in an agricultural state, with large teaching loads per professor, no TAs, and about 15-25 hours of committee or other non-teaching work. That was my situation.
Teaching five courses and eight sections, 20-30 students per section, 10-20 office hours every week (and often more if the professor cared about the students), leaves little time for grading. In desperation I turned to weekly homework assignments, 4-6 programming projects, and multiple choice exams (containing code and questions about it). Not ideal by any means, just the best I could do.
So I smile now (I'm retired) when I hear about professors with several TAs each, explaining how they do assessment of 36 students at a school with competitive enrollment.
I could accept this for a 300 students class, but 36? When I got my degree, ALL exams had an oral component, usually more than 30 minutes long. The prof and one or two TAs would take a couple days and just do it. For 36 students it’s more than doable. If I was a student being examined by an LLM I would feel like the professor didn’t care enough to do the work.