Posted by theanonymousone 1 day ago
Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....
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 still don't really like it but I also realised that dragons don't appear from portals and eat you immediately if you do it.
My missus is much like I was but she never got through it, she finds it fascinating that I can.
I was good at it because I sold the customer what they needed vs what the company wanted me to sell them, it actually led to the same customers coming back and asking for me by name and I got offered a job by one of them - I do wonder what my life would have been like had I taken it but it also led to my entire career as well, my first consulting gig came off the back of a conversation with a customer about a quote they'd had for some development and with the hubris of youth I said I could do that way cheaper (I could and I did, found out later how much cheaper and kicked myself, also a valuable lesson - You don't get paid for your effort, you get paid to save them money, if you are saving them a lot of money you can charge a lot of money).
Was never going to be my career and didn't pay particularly well so I wasn't too concerned about what management thought long term.
What also helped me is being so knowledgeable about the topic that I didn't need to prepare the presentation much (except for the slides and the general plan). When you know what you have to talk about, it becomes a lot more natural and relaxed for me.
I would be a lot more stressed if I had to learn a presentation by heart and it would probably be a robotic delivery.
So I did quite a few "surprise" presentations, with very light prepared material and a topic I cared about. Got me the practice I needed and I learned not to get "stuck" as if I forgot the next sentence. The presentation always flows!
Now, I have a talk at a major conference, and I'm afraid this won't work there, so I'll prepare my talk better this time, maybe even have speaker notes!
1. Actually being very knowledgeable about the subject in question, to the extent that I can offer facts or well-reasoned opinion on the topic on essentially any reasonable question. In other words, not being a junior high school student asked to do a 15 minute speech on a topic drawn from a hat.
2. Not having the idea that the audience expects a correct and immediate answer to every possible question.
3. Not doing every single speech literally in front of 15% of my entire peer group, including all my friends, all the people I admired, and all the people who treated me poorly.
I still hate doing Zoom calls without slides or a screen to share because I can't stand having 20 people staring intently at me. It's just distracting. But otherwise I have no problem at all talking for hours on a topic I know well.
Doing a presentation on Zoom seems kind of pointless as you lose the connection to the audience. I'd rather just assign a pre-record to watch and do a live Q&A later on. More like a Lecture+Tutorial format.
I run into this in the military too. "The person to do the ethics/roe/safety/drugs/mental health brief just called in sick. Two hundred soldiers will be here at 0800 tomorrow. Read fast."
Yup, that's the cure. Worked for me, too.
That’s why exposure therapy with an anxiety ladder is important
Fears are further reinforced if, when you trip over your words and get all anxious, your audience laughs at you rather than with you.
And think of your whole education hinged on a presentation in front teachers and pupils.
Nightmare fuel for many
However, there are very challenging tasks that can help to build experience in smaller groups. Like talking about a topic you just received a second earlier, without preparation, in a group of 10 where everybody takes turns and knows the experience from both sides.
The teacher started off with "you're all going to look like idiots and embarrass yourselves, and you'll have to get over it. Best you do it here now rather than in front of coworkers in a few years. She gave us skills and techniques that I still rely on today, and most importantly, the opportunity to practice.
I was a introverted going in to college, and that class didn't turn my into an extroverted social butterfly in 4 months. However, I have never been paralyzed with fear when required to talk in front of a crowd, and that has been invaluable in my career.
Like every time I hear "Oh I'm just not a math person." It's not that I expect everyone to like math because I do, not at all. But I do expect people to not artificially limit themselves. :/
So a few years ago, I took a drawing course, and pushed it as fas as I could. The results were the best I ever did in my life, and not terrible, but still far from good. At this point, I've decided this is as good as things will get, and I should stop spending effort and focus on other things that I am good in.
If I happen to find myself in a situation that requires me to draw, I will make a honest effort. Maybe something will happen that makes me grow. But I have decided that for the forseeable future I am not a drawing person and that's fine.
as a side note, "woe betide you" roughly means "you're in for a very bad time", not "I feel sorry for you".
I was pointing it out because the first comment I was replying to was clearly unpacking the word "woe" from the phrase "woe betide" and I figured they would appreciate the linguistic footnote.
However, the only way out is through. I confidently speak in front of 100’s regularly. I can pick up the damn phone (still a twinge of anxiety, but nothing like it was). The cure that works just seems to be “do it until it’s mundane”.
As an aside, it’s vital from the career perspective. You can’t let fear, no matter how extreme it feels, stop you. It’s a terrible cliche, but still true “no courage without fear”.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.70031
https://www.thecrimson.com/column/a-night-at-the-symphony/ar...
Depending on your role this number can be much higher.
I'd say "get over it", because this is simply a fact of life and you'll have to talk to and present in front of a group of people at some point, perhaps regularly too.
It's easy to get used to the former, much harder for the latter.
I take my meds so that my heart does not explode from talking to a person. So yeah at some point, deal with it.
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.
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.
Whether it succeeds in that goal is a separate topic.
Corruption affected history or economics because it was ideologically relevant to authorities but math and physics proceeded on its own.
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.
If you're blind, you won't be a racing driver, that's just how it is.
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.)
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.
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
Problems with test-taking varied, but common issues were getting distracted by extraneous stimuli in "regular" classrooms. Frequently ADHD students were slow readers and really did need/use extra time. But the biggest problem was test-taking anxiety, often quite prominent, contributing to difficulty with tests.
Interestingly, more than not ADHD students were reluctant to ask for accommodations. Some never availed themselves of this benefit. Others only used part of the options they could use.
In my practice were a number of ADHD adults admitted to nursing school, some having serious academic difficulties and eventually asking for accommodations. The assistance was effective. Notably, none of these student-patients failed or dropped out, all graduated. A pleasant footnote to add is a subset of these nurses developed exceptional skill earning them leadership positions in their institutions.
Reputable clinicians wouldn't give an ADHD diagnosis or support academic accommodations without sufficient clinical evidence.
Not a school I'd be tempted to apply to. Scholastic competition is one thing, but scrapping for every conceivable speck of "I'm better than the next guy" is not a bit attractive. I wonder about the campus atmosphere. Seems likely contesting would be a hard to break habit. I feel tense just thinking about it :/
Of course, ADHD students are less likely to achieve near-perfect grades than non-ADHD peers. Though it's not impossible for an ADHD student to succeed. Anyway, not at all uncommon for a student to do very well until subjects become more complex and challenging. Conceivably a student could look promising, but then suddenly have great difficulty keeping up.
So a safe bet that at least a few students at the top-level school have ADHD. If the school offers little or no accommodation, affected students probably have to accept getting educated elsewhere. Fortunately, more than not ADHD treatment is effective, a favorable response can make a pivotal difference in the student's outcome.
No offence, but this is a ridiculous thing to get worked up about. Various neurological conditions exhibit in people just being “slow” in exams. No one ever diagnosed me with anything (probably too long ago), but teachers somehow understood that I was one of these and gave me extra time on exams.
I didn’t want it (who wants to be in an exam a minute longer than required!). But I did need it through high school. In university I was able to complete in time (mostly); I suspect because I had practiced doing exams so much by then that I’d figured out how to optimise for time (maybe everyone knows this and I was just very slow to learn it?).
I’m someone who excelled academically, and it was an important part of my identity at that time. And I do remember exams (before teachers gave me more time) where I’d get a lower grade as I’d only completed 70%. It was incredibly painful; I knew the material, if only I could get it down on paper in time! (I’ve also been an incredibly slow writer). Extra time for someone who struggles to complete on time isn’t cheating - it’s allowing people to demonstrate what they can do.
Are you sure your parents weren't involved in the background?
> Extra time for someone who struggles to complete on time isn’t cheating - it’s allowing people to demonstrate what they can do.
For me it becomes cheating when its no longer allowed to be mentioned on the certificate that extra time was given.
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.
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.
I was the PhD student in the room in dozens of these exams, and I toke some of them myself. But that was for classes with a bit less than 40 to maybe 60-80 students. The load for the larger ones was shared among professors, if I remember correctly. But it was certainly the case that a single professor spent 1-2 days doing nothing else but these exams.
And it was 1 professor and 1 PhD students, and those don't count. They essentially grow on trees and are always available, if you need some.
Since each course needs its eval, assessment is a function of N, not N*K or K. Much easier to scale if there is ~5 evals per student per year than ~20.
I think education is something better scaled horizontally than vertically. More schools, with more professors instead increasing the student per professor throughput. The classes where I learned the absolute most, and had the best experience, were closer in size to 25 than 100.
The horizontal capacity is ineffectively used by having many degree mills and low-value degrees, but if we re-tooled the knowledge sets we could raise the bar.
As for the quality, I think small classrooms with good teachers probably produces a better outcome than large classrooms with great teachers.
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.
They are likely prone to more biases than written exams, and the variability among examiners is likely high. My experience is both in taking these exams myself, and also sitting in on them as the note taker many times. Though that was only with one specific professor, and almost always on the same course. But that was in my experience a very fair exam, even for those students that were very noticeably nervous.
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.
You don't need to do everything orally. A return to handwritten final exams done without electronic aids would help too. They can be open note as mine were in the mid 70s or even open book.
As for scalability, I really don't see the problem; if we are producing so many qualified people then we surely can use some of them to examine the next generation. It sounds like the argument that often appears on the web where someone, usually an American, claims that a solution that works in, say the UK, can't work in their country simply because their population is larger.
Also, we really should consider if shoe horning every young person into an academic institution is useful either to society or to the person concerned. It certainly has not been an unmixed success in the UK.
* you are in school and your marks are between two marks, e.g. between 1 and 2. You can voluntarily take the oral exam to swing the tide towards the 1 ... this is even a case for apprenticeship exams, not just normal school. * you are at the risk of not getting into the next class year. Often here the oral exam is mandatory.
Personally, I think this is great. Some people are better orally. But some have trouble, e.g. social anxieties. And some people are better theoretical, with a piece of paper. But other struggle with an "empty white paper". And since we don't want to test the difficulties of people, but their domain knowledge of e.g. mathematics, politics or electronic scheme design (again: think that this is also for apprenticeships), that we do both is IMHO a good thing.
So we’re probably going to see a split- mass production schools that still act as job training for Industrial Revolution era jobs will keep doing what they are doing. Schools that want to keep their academic prestige will implement these inefficient safeguards and raise prices accordingly. Employers will distinguish between these two types of diplomas when there are enough options out there that are combatting cheating- much like in-person schools are generally valued higher than online educations, or how certain schools (MIT, Stanford) are valued higher then others. This might lead us to the transformation of higher education many have been anticipating, because the current system cannot remain as-is. We all thought technology was the thing causing the upheaval but AI has really accelerated things.
And that's before we get to technological changes making that sort of knowledge and those skills much less valuable.
As an aside, accessibility cuts both ways. As a person with ADHD I'd much rather do oral and practical exams.
It can also be graded blindly. That allows for removing–or at least mitigating–biases in evaluation.
Interestingly, you dont consider your 'inverse' point: that now the manual part of teaching the stuff can (and definitely will) be automated with LLMs.
It will become similar to coding: humans evaluate, LLMs just provide what has been mechanical for a couple hundred years
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
The list of conditions that qualify for what will most likely have to be redone completely from scratch.
I'm not joking: you could have an AI quiz the students and test their understanding. That way the tests go deeper into testing the understanding by following through on the answers, and are standardized and fair for everyone. I don't think we are there yet at all but I actually think its not insane for the future. I expect downvotes though/I don't think our generation would agree with this.
What's old is new :)
So for a dane this reads like “back to the old way”, rather than anything new or novel.
Things like the Denmark approach (and/or in-person written responses) seem like a better direction. Treat take-home writing the same as we've treated take-home math questions - as useful practice (for those who choose to actually engage with it), but not a significant input to grading.
- 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 understandingA 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.
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.
Written exams are also not best suited to project-based classes.
What’s the best way to grade students in classes with coding projects?