Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments • Hacker News Board

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#251

Post by wpietri » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 2:01 AM UTC

jtafurth wrote: post #137

cm2012 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to be an adult functioning in society, being able to briefly talk about your ideas with strangers is important.

I doubt the question here is about willingness, but inability due to real medical conditions. Assuming real and sufficiently severe ADHD.

As an ADHDer, I think talks and discussion are way better than written exams. The most common treatments for ADHD are stimulants, but human interaction is a natural stimulant, and the real-time feedback of a human audience is more engaging.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#252

Post by wpietri » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

datahack wrote: post #56

This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments. 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 han…

I'm quite skeptical that industrial-age measures of efficiency are the right way to think about education. Feinman's story about teaching in Brazil comes to mind: https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu...

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.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#253

Post by molybd3num » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 2:14 AM UTC

in the french CPGEs they have you make a mini research project to be presented in front of 2/3 judges at the end of the 2 years, each year has it's own theme (this year it's efficiency/optimisation) thankfully it doesn't need to be very deep, but it has to tie somewhat into the curriculum which can be annoying

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#254

Post by noAnswer » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 2:15 AM UTC

lll-o-lll wrote: post #216

viccis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of course, woe betide those with social phobias 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 spe…

> college here gives students with ADHD double time on exams 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…

> teachers somehow understood that I was one of these

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.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#255

Post by rf_physics » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 2:52 AM UTC

trostaft wrote: post #72

lacoolj wrote: post #31

Why is everyone in this thread comparing this to a University 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.

I'm teaching a university math course next semester and I've been messing around with a solution to this that my old analysis professor used to employ. Every week, they take home a handful of theory questions. These aren't turned in for credit. But, every week, there'll be a short quiz where one of those questions are asked verbatim, along with a small follow up. That felt like a very natural solution to me. Of cours…

This follow up idea is a fun one! Not likely I'll have to be teaching a course like this again, but I will suggest it to some people I know.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#256

Post by wisty » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 2:54 AM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #204

cloudie78 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, former student with social phobia and terrified of public speaking. 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 worked in sales for a few years when I was younger before I started my actual career, I went from an introvert afraid of public speaking to completely comfortable breaking the ice with basically anyone in those years (mostly because I liked having four walls and a roof) and that led to me doing technical training/talks to strangers years later. I still don't really like it but I also realised that dragons don't app…

The social model of diability is great in some ways (encouraging activism), but the idea that everything needs to be changed to be "designed for" people with disabilities has its downsides. Not all disabilities can be overcome, but to the extent that some can (at least partly), often IMO it's a good thing to have an expectation that most people can deal with the real world.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#257

Post by noisy_boy » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 4:52 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #252

datahack wrote: post #56

This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments. 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 han…

I'm quite skeptical that industrial-age measures of efficiency are the right way to think about education. Feinman's story about teaching in Brazil comes to mind: https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu... 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 ra…

Thanks for sharing that story. A lot of that resonated with me, having come from a similar background in education.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#258

Post by cycomanic » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 5:37 AM UTC

Athas wrote: post #159

azalemeth wrote: post #3

This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's ve…

Clarification for non-Danes: this post is not entirely accurate. Not all Master's courses in Denmark have oral examinations, and many courses before the Master's level (including elementary school) have oral exams. It is unrelated to the academic level, and instead related to the academic discipline and the size of the course. The latter is in my experience the main constraint, as oral exams are difficult to scale. T…

There was an interesting talk I heard a while ago about the scalability of oral exams vs written. They did quite a bit of study of typical exam preparation and marking times and the cross over point where oral exams were actually taking longer than written exams was surprisingly high, around 180 students or so. To be fair though I think they considered 15 min oral exams, but the gist is that in the scalability argument people tend to forget to account for marking and exam design time appropriately.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#259

Post by sobani » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 6:10 AM UTC

sensanaty wrote: post #198

khazhoux wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic “get over it” condescension. Some people are unable to control their strong physiological reaction to in-person judgement. Go tell professional orchestra players who rely on propranolol to control their stage fright to just grow up and start becoming a “proper functioning adult.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.70031 https://www.thecrimson.com/column/a-night-at-the-symphony/ar...

I have approx 10 meetings a week, usually more, sometimes less. Let's say around 8 hours a week spent in meetings, sometimes with people who hold the power to fire me. 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.

There's a slight difference between a bog standard daily standup with mildly interested colleagues and a career defining examination where multiple experts will dissect every word you say.

It's easy to get used to the former, much harder for the latter.

Re: Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

#260

Post by holgerschurig » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 7:15 AM UTC

datahack wrote: post #56

This is how higher education was done for literal centuries before moving to the written word. So it’s not exactly innovative to return to oral arguments. 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 han…

Oral exams are --- at least partial -- a thing since "ever" in the german school system. Details matter, over here schooling belongs to culture, and the culture sector is in the hands of the 16 federal german states, so things vary a bit from e.g. Hessen to Bayern to Sachsen.

* 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.