This is authored by Dr Jenni Greig | Lecturer in the School of Psychology
Context – Why this mattered
Real-time oral assessments are rapidly becoming a go-to assessment tool as we seek to meet TEQSA requirements for assurance of learning. In Psychology, we also need to meet accreditation requirements and ensure our students are gaining necessary competencies.
Reading, thinking, drafting, and editing can be done privately and iteratively. Oral assessments, however, require real-time performance under direct observation.
Comedian Josh Johnson observed that teachers are often seen as “the obstacle as opposed to the help” (Johnson, 2025), recalling a teacher who patiently taught him to tie his shoe. Similarly, psychology students under pressure to achieve high marks and secure registration may view us as barriers to their goals, rather than people helping them develop the knowledge and skills needed once they are in practice.
Human Insight – What changed my thinking
What changed my thinking– I draw on my experience in qualitative research to make real-time oral assessments a genuine point of human connection with students. As a researcher, I often gather data through interviews. Several aspects of this data collection apply to running an oral assessment:
- Semi-structured approach: using a set of questions or topics to cover while giving the student/participant space to share their insights.
- Yielding control: accepting that real-time interactions involve unpredictability.
- Navigating uncertainty and anxiety: research participants often wonder if they are giving a researcher “what they need” or “something useful”. Similarly, students often wonder if they are “on the right track” or giving enough information.
- Understanding shared social meaning: Helping students/participants articulate, connect, and clarify their ideas in real time.
Crucially, in a real-time oral assessment and in qualitative data interaction the goal is to elicit information that belongs to the student or participant. Not to prompt them in a painful game of ‘guess what’s in my head’.
Practice – What I redesigned
As academics, we all come to this task of assessment with our own personalities, and preferences for how we connect in professional spaces. Below are some things that work for me:
- As a non-teaching marker, making a brief guest appearance during a class a few weeks out. This humanises me with the students.
- Taking time to prepare (practice) running the assessment (with colleagues or an educational designer) can be helpful.
- In the session, but before the assessment officially starts: normalise a small amount of anxiety but assure them that we don’t want it to overwhelm them; position myself as “with them” – two humans interacting; use formalities (“housekeeping”) as an opportunity for them to get comfortable; explain things you may do as part of the process, and why that is designed to help them. For example, preparing students that you might interrupt them to make sure they get time for all the questions will help avoid them being ‘thrown’ or wondering, mid-assessment, if you are interrupting because they are doing ‘badly’.
- Using minimal responses and follow-up questions (“mmmm …”, “can you tell me more about that?”) and get comfortable with silences. Students may need a moment to think before answering.
- Create positive interactions: Find a joke and use it regularly; create a small ‘celebration’ moment when the student’s time is finished (“Guess what? You’re done!”, “I hope you’ve got something fun planned to celebrate getting this out of the way”)
- Debriefing: I find it difficult to give in-depth feedback on the fly. During the assessment, I note two strengths and one area for further development to mention. If a student appears distressed after the assessment, check they are okay to leave the meeting.
Impact – What changed and how I know
what changed and how I know – Assessments can be a human experience which reinforces learning. The feedback I’ve had from students is that doing their oral assessment “wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be”. Some even “enjoyed” it.
This approach has costs. It takes time to do well, and emotional and cognitive resources for markers, particularly when working with large student cohorts.
My Elevate experience
Many of us enter academia wanting to share knowledge in engaging ways that foster curiosity, authentic, deep learning, and career readiness. By acknowledging the humans in the room, we can strengthen learning through connection, particularly when institutional structures support this approach.
This reflective blog post is part of the Faculty’s Learning and Teaching SLOWposium 2026: Elevate session. Continue the conversation by exploring the reflections of our fellow presenters and discovering new perspectives on learning and teaching. Read the other presenters’ reflections here.
“It’s an unusual balance we strike as educators. We want students to engage deeply with what they’re learning, and we also need to assess that learning. Sometimes that can make us appear like the people standing in the way of students achieving their goals….”
You can download Jenni’s presentation slides here