The two-lane approach to assessment is catching on everywhere.
Lane 1 is secure: in-person exams or oral assessments. Lane 2 is open, where students can use AI freely.
It's a good framework. We need a way to verify capability without AI interference, and we also need to teach students how to work alongside AI.
But shifting more weight to Lane 1 creates a problem we aren't talking about enough. We're throwing students into much higher-pressure environments.
Take oral exams. Because take-home essays are no longer reliable signals of learning, a lot of courses are pivoting to vivas.
Imagine walking into a room and being asked to defend your semester's work in ten minutes. The assessor questions your methodology. You have to structure a counter-argument in real time. If you haven't practiced this, you freeze.
Doing it live for a final grade is incredibly difficult. If we just drop these secure assessments at the end of a semester without any buildup, we aren't really measuring knowledge. We're measuring extroversion. Or who handles anxiety best. Or who speaks English as a first language.
A student might know the material inside and out, but if they panic under live questioning, their grade tanks.
Assessment design is a massive equity issue. For years, written essays gave introverts, neurodivergent students, and non-native speakers a buffer. They had time to process, draft, and refine. Moving to a live viva strips that buffer away. It forces students to process and speak at the same time, under pressure.
If we don't adjust our teaching, we are penalizing anyone who doesn't fit the mold of a fast-talking, confident debater. It's not fair, and it's not transparent to change the rules of the game without teaching the new rules.
Students need low-stakes practice articulating and defending their ideas long before the final grade is on the line. We need to build real-time reasoning and pushback directly into weekly coursework. If we want to test these skills securely in week 12, we have to teach them in weeks 1 through 11.
This requires a massive shift in how we structure class time. Tutorials can no longer just be a review of the readings. They have to become training grounds for oral defense.
Educators have to adapt, too. Running a fair oral assessment is a completely different job than marking a stack of essays. You have to manage a student's live anxiety so they can actually speak. You have to grade messy, nonlinear verbal answers. You have to actively fight your own unconscious bias—because it's very easy to give higher marks to a student who sounds confident than to one who is hesitant but correct.
Most educators have never been trained to do this. We're asking them to become expert interviewers overnight.
We can't just mandate secure assessments. We have to teach people how to navigate them. If we don't, we're just punishing students for not being professional debaters.
