A Study on the Effectiveness of Team-Based Oral Examinations in an Undergraduate Engineering Course

The conventional and pervasive written exam format used in undergraduate engineering courses, while practical, may be neither the most effective assessment tool in determining a student’s ability to perform in the professional arena, nor an effective tool to motivate students to understand the fundamental concepts on which the exam is based. The effectiveness and practicality of employing team-based oral examinations in lieu of individual written midterm exams in an undergraduate course will be presented in this paper. Several of the disadvantages of written exams are addressed with the protocol developed for the oral exams. These protocols are defined and discussed. Aggregate student performance on the oral exams and the written final exam from the experimental group are presented and examined. Effectiveness of the teambased oral exams is quantitatively assessed through a comparison of student performance between the control (individual written exams) and the experimental group (team-based oral exams). The final exam average for the two groups is provided as a point of comparison to determine assessment impact. Additionally, the effectiveness of the team-based oral exams from the students’ perspective is quantitatively and qualitatively assessed using results from a 5-point Likert survey and candid comments. The subjective experiences from the student and professor perspectives are presented. Survey results indicate an increase in the effort, retention and recall of knowledge of the students, a finding also supported by the final exam average comparison. The team-based oral exams appear to serve as a more effective tool than the traditional testing method to evaluate students’ learning and facilitate their deeper understanding of the course content.