How can teachers tell if a student wrote that essay or AI did? A growing number of professors have found a simple low-tech solution — just ask the student to explain it out loud.

Across the country, a growing number of educators are dealing with the temptation for students to rely on Large Language Models by turning to the old-school solution of oral exams.

The strategy makes it harder for students to use powerful AI platforms like ChatGPT to breeze through take-home exams, crank out essays, and complete virtually any assignment — all part of a broader phenomenon known as “cognitive offloading.”

A University of Wyoming religious studies professor, Catherine Hartmann, likens her classroom to a gym, often telling her students that they wouldn’t bring a forklift to a muscle-building workout session.

“The classroom is a gymnasium, and I am your personal trainer,” she said to The Washington Post. “I want you to lift the weights.”

Earlier this month, she administered a final exam for her honors seminar students in which each one sat opposite her as she asked probing questions. Many of her students have embraced the testing method. 

Lily Leman, 20, a double major in Spanish and history who recently took her final exam, admitted to the Post to being “pretty freaked out” at first by the prospect of an oral test. She now says she wishes more of her professors would follow suit. 

“With this exam, I don’t know how you would use AI, frankly,” she said to the newspaper.

In a recent survey of college students, a staggering 85 percent confessed to using AI to brainstorm ideas, prep for quizzes, or worse. A quarter of students polled admitted they had used AI to knock out assignments entirely, according to the Inside Higher Ed study.

Perhaps most telling: roughly 30 percent of the students said colleges need to develop more AI-proof assessment methods, oral exams among them.

Some professors have fought back with detection software, though the available tools struggle to produce reliable results. Others have gone decidedly analog, reverting to in-class handwritten exams, spurring a resurgence in the use of “blue books” — those paper booklets that dominated college testing in the late 20^th century.

Oral exams, however, are a tried-and-true method used since the time of ancient philosophers in Rome, Greece, and India. They were also the default method of assessment at Oxford and Cambridge universities until the 18th century. In countries like Norway and Demark, the method never really went away.

The director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California at San Diego, Bertram Gallant, told the Post that oral assessments are “definitely experiencing a renaissance.”

While they are not always the answer, she believes they provide an added benefit be encouraging students to develop a skill that many will find valuable after they graduate.

Every department “should require their students at one point — probably at more than one point — to demonstrate their knowledge orally,” she said.