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Why we built a way to hear what students actually understand

There is a question sitting under almost every conversation about teaching right now. When a student hands in a piece of work, does that work still tell you what they understand?

For a long time the answer was mostly yes. The thinking happened first, and the essay or report was the trace it left behind. That link has become much weaker. Students can produce polished work quickly with AI support, and the finished document no longer reliably shows the reasoning behind it.

Most responses to this have been disappointing. Detection tools are unreliable and ask instructors to accuse students based on a probability score. Proctoring is intrusive and creates distrust. Closed book exams protect integrity, but usually at the cost of everything that made the assessment worth doing.

There is one approach that has always worked. If you want to know whether someone understands something, you talk with them about it.

Why conversation is such strong assessment

Explaining your own work is hard to fake. You have to follow an unexpected question, justify a choice you made three weeks ago, and admit when you are unsure. That is why oral assessment has remained the format assessors trust most, from medicine to law to engineering. Research on interactive orals points the same way, showing that they prevent misconduct rather than detect it afterwards, and that they hold up as rigorous assessment across large and diverse cohorts.

There is a second benefit that often gets missed. Articulating your reasoning out loud is one of the best evidenced ways to consolidate learning, so the conversation is not only a check. It is a moment where understanding actually settles.

So why is almost nobody running orals at scale? Because the arithmetic has always been brutal. Two hundred students at fifteen minutes each is fifty hours of assessor time, before scheduling, rooms, recording equipment, note taking, and the documentation quality assurance will ask for later. That is the problem we set out to solve.

What the solution is

Oral Assessment and Practice brings together three learning tools that run inside your LMS. You do not need to adopt all three, and most institutions start with the one that matches the pressure they feel most this term.

Oral Practice gives students a space to rehearse explaining their thinking before anything is graded, either with Acai as a conversation partner or with a peer in the assessor role. There is no limit on attempts, and every session is recorded and stored so students can watch themselves back. This matters for fairness as much as confidence, because students who have never done an oral are otherwise assessed partly on their familiarity with the format.

Oral Reflection asks students to record a short structured video walking through their work and their reasoning, guided by prompts you set. Acai highlights the key moments in each recording, so you navigate straight to what matters and spend minutes reviewing rather than hours. Feedback can be left at the exact point in the recording where something happened.

Oral Assessment supports the formal graded conversation. Sessions follow a shared outline so every assessor works from the same structure, and Acai can suggest that outline, help shape rubric criteria, and offer follow up questions during the session that only you can see. Everything is recorded, transcribed, searchable, and pushed back to your LMS. Sessions can run one to one, in groups, or with several assessors, in person, online, or asynchronously.

The principle underneath it

One design decision runs through all of this. The AI supports the assessor and does not replace the assessor. Acai suggests questions, surfaces evidence, and drafts summaries. The instructor decides what the conversation revealed and what grade it deserves. That boundary is the whole point, because assessment decisions carry real consequences for real people.

The second principle is that evidence should be a by product of good practice rather than an extra task. Recordings, transcripts, and rubric aligned judgements are captured automatically, so moderation and accreditation reviews have something solid to draw on without anyone writing documentation afterwards.

For students, work that is genuinely theirs gets recognised as theirs, and they leave with a skill employers consistently ask for. For instructors, the shift is from suspicion to insight. For institutions, authentic assessment stops being something that only works in small cohorts.

"The most important thing as a teacher is having the feeling back that great work is really from the student." Dr. Jako Volschenk, Associate Professor at Stellenbosch Business School

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See it inside your own LMS

The best way to judge the fit is to see it running in the environment your students and staff already use.

‍Book a demo

We will walk through your current assessment approach and answer the questions specific to your institution.

Explore the learning tools in more detail: Oral Assessment and Practice, Oral Practice, Oral Reflection, and Oral Assessment.

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