Law Schools Reconsider Oral Exams for AI-Aided Students

A Reason essay published on June 22, 2026, argues that law-school assessment practices need rethinking as generative AI becomes common in student work. The author reports that when ChatGPT reached mainstream use in 2022, it triggered questions about exam formats. The essay describes student techniques for evading proctoring, including placing substances on webcams and using phones or smart glasses to capture questions and consult AI, producing near-perfect answers. The author cites a memo by Dean Bobby Chesney at the University of Texas; Chesney writes that "we've also seen a surge of interest in assessments involving class participation and live presentations (even oral exams in some cases)." The author also writes, "My tentative plan for ConLaw in the spring is to switch to an oral, in-person midterm."

For practitioners and educators, mainstream availability of large language models such as ChatGPT and search-integrated assistants like Gemini changes the threat model for standard, remotely proctored, and take-home assessments. Industry-pattern observations: camera-based proctoring and locked-down browsers can be bypassed by off-camera devices or optical capture, and models can produce polished answers quickly, shifting the integrity problem from detection to assessment design.

Higher-education reporting and internal memos such as Chesney's reflect a growing institutional focus on live, demonstrable student performance. For law schools and other programs that value applied reasoning and oral advocacy, the essay frames oral, in-person evaluation as one response that preserves real-time evidence of student mastery. This does not provide a comprehensive solution to academic integrity, but it changes the observable signal evaluators rely on.

Observers should track:

• •broader faculty adoption of live or oral assessment formats
• •institutional policies or memos like Chesney's that codify changes
• •vendor responses in proctoring and assessment design, including tools that enable secure, scalable oral examinations or structured, open-ended prompts that emphasize process over final prose

Editorial analysis: These trends matter to practitioners building assessment platforms, proctoring technology, and academic-tools integrations because they alter product requirements toward low-latency, identity-assured, and interaction-focused features rather than essay similarity detection alone.