Socratic Style
Faculty are revisiting an old form of educational assessment with winning results.
In the weeks leading up to her fall midterm exam for the course “Cryptography,” Emily Axelrod ’25 and three classmates frequently gathered in an empty classroom to practice math problems. “One student would present a problem on the board, and the rest of us would ask questions about the material,” Axelrod recalls.
But this exam would be different from the written tests she and her study partners, all juniors at the time, had taken. Math professor Leo Goldmakher expected them to answer questions orally, stating and proving theorems and discussing the concepts behind them. It was a first for Axelrod, who quickly became a fan of the testing style.
“At their core, oral exams are exemplary of what a liberal arts education is about,” says the math and religion major. “As Williams students, we don’t just learn content but also how to think deeply and articulate that thinking to others.”
Oral exams date back to Socrates, the Greek philosopher known for saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. This conversational yet rigorous style of educational assessment largely fell out of favor around the mid-19th century, by which time written exams emerged as the dominant mode.
Today, an increasing number of faculty at U.S. colleges and universities are revisiting this old form of testing as a companion to written exams and essays. At Williams, they’re taking hold across a variety of disciplines.
Last spring Goldmakher co-led a Rice Center for Teaching workshop with history professor Magnus Bernhardsson and music professor Elizabeth Elmi on the benefits of oral exams. During the hour-long session, they shared their experiences and advice for making the exams more effective and less anxiety-inducing for students.
“The biggest pitfall of oral exams is psychological,” says Goldmakher, a longtime proponent of the format, who speaks from experience.
While a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, one of his professors gave only oral exams. Still new to the format, he describes the academic rite of passage as both “interesting and terrifying. There’s no hiding during an oral exam.”
Recalling that time, Goldmakher says he studied hard and was confident about roughly 90% of the material. “But, like everyone, I have blind spots,” he says. “At some point during the exam, the professor asked me a question about something that I had never in my life thought about. However, he gave me space to think and figure it out.”
No matter the subject, being able to figure things out, connect ideas and articulate them in the moment are essential to the oral exam experience.
“Math, like many other sectors, consists of conceptual pieces and technical pieces,” Goldmakher says. “The goal is to be able to do both. You want to be able to understand abstract concepts, but you should also know how to work out the details.”
Before joining the Williams faculty in 2014, Goldmakher taught at the University of Toronto, where he experimented with oral exams. “Some students could just come in and answer questions, but it could be a complete catastrophe for others,” he says. “Over time, I slowly settled on a format that seems to allay a lot of those psychological issues.”
Goldmakher’s oral exams typically consist of an opening question, a computational question and two conceptual ones. He provides students with a list of potential exam questions in advance so they can prepare their thoughts and practice presenting them.
Oral exams are “a very honest and more objective form of evaluation,” Goldmakher says, with benefits to faculty and students alike. “And they’re way more rewarding, because there’s an educational component to it.”
Citing her midterm experience, Axelrod agrees. “Yes, the oral exam was a test of what I knew, but it was clear that Professor Goldmakher’s end goal was not just assessment but to help each student actually understand the course material,” she says. “I could probably present on it today, a year-and-a-half later.”