The Return of the Oral Exam

A 50-minute working session for business faculty.

When every assignment can be AI-generated, a written submission no longer tells you who understood the material. The oldest fix, the oral exam, still works. It just never scaled past a handful of students. In 50 minutes I will build a real spoken assessment live, on a business-course topic, and show you the graded transcript it produces.

What you will leave with:

  • A concrete way to verify genuine understanding in your fall course, without forty hours of one-on-one orals.

  • The exact three-part format, spoken prompt, roleplay, and video ticket, seen built live on a real topic.

  • A sample graded transcript you can picture dropping straight into your gradebook.

A digital student grade review form displays scores for categories: Use of evidence, Quality of assumptions, Trade-off reasoning, Adapts under questioning, and Communication, with a final submission button labeled "Confirm, send to student".

Featured Speakers

John Hathcoth

James Madison University

Moshe Mikanovsky

Schulich School of Business

Melissa Morgan

Cofounder of Coraltalk

Close-up of a smiling woman wearing white glasses, gold earrings, and a black and white patterned jacket in an indoor setting.

“I love it because I get to speak to Coraltalk in a deeper way.”

- Sarah Ajekwe, MBA student, York University

Young man with dark hair, beard, wearing a black T-shirt with white graphics, and a gold chain sitting in an empty lecture hall.

“I use Coraltalk to understand the material in class more.”

- Tushar Sroya, MBA student, York University

A man wearing glasses and a light blue shirt, holding a black marker, speaking in front of a presentation screen.

“I need to hear how students reason. Coraltalk allows me to assess their thinking at scale — not just their ability to produce polished writing.”

- Moshe Mikanovsky, MBA Professor at YorkU

Read the full Case Study →