Student Emotional Response to Oral Assessments in Computing and Mathematics

The COVID-19 pandemic created a host of issues for institutions of higher education over the past year, including the issue of how to effectively assess student learning when courses are taught remotely. In this work-in-progress paper we present our experience using remote oral assessments in five introductory courses in two subject areas: computing and mathematics. We discuss our motivation for adopting this new assessment format and how to successfully implement remote oral assessments to replace traditional written final exams. We conducted a post-assessment student survey to understand how students responded to the oral exam format. The purpose of the survey was to gather feedback on students' emotions during and after the assessment. Our preliminary quantitative results show that overall students experienced more positive than negative emotions in all courses, though students responded differently in computing and mathematics courses. Students generally favored the oral format, and those who did not have previous experience with this type of assessment had a similar positive response to students who were more familiar with the format. We expect to shed more light on students' experience with the oral assessment as we will continue our research and conduct a qualitative study of the open-ended responses in the survey.