Over the last few years, countless commentators have confidently declared the take-home essay dead. These commentators point out that students are increasingly using large language models to write their essays and that attempts to police this with detection or surveillance have failed.
We agree that policing artificial intelligence use is unworkable. However, we reject the assumption that this is the only way to preserve the integrity of the take-home essay, which still has important pedagogical value. Instead, we advocate pairing take-home essays with short oral exams in which students must demonstrate that they can take full intellectual responsibility for the work they submit.
The appeal of the oral exam is that it doesn’t require the instructor to play cop. If a student cannot adequately explain their own essay, they are simply marked down for their failure of understanding. There is no need for any detective work to figure out whether and how AI was used. Furthermore, students are disincentivized from outsourcing their work to AI, since weak performance on the oral exam carries clear costs.
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