Just saw this piece from NBC Connecticut and had to stop scrolling.
Colleges like Cornell, Penn, and NYU are pushing students into live oral exams to defend their own work.
The reason is pretty simple.
The assignments look great. Then the questions start, and it falls apart. Students can’t explain what they submitted.
One professor said it directly: “You won’t be able to AI your way through an oral exam.”
Another admitted he no longer trusts written assignments to reflect actual thinking.
That’s a big shift.
For a long time, strong output was enough. You assumed the thinking was there behind it. That’s getting harder to believe.
What’s interesting is that schools are landing on something that’s always worked. You push on someone’s thinking in real time, and you find out very quickly what’s real and what isn’t.
The problem is it doesn’t scale.
That’s where Socratic Metric™ starts to fit into this conversation.
It’s the same idea, just applied in a way that doesn’t require adding hours of faculty time for every class.
At some point this becomes less about what a student turns in, and more about what happens when you ask them to walk through it.
Feels like we’re already there.
