Class projects in the AI era: oral exams and alternative grading
Rob Furrow & Ben Rivera
Friday, September 11th, 2026
11-11:45 am
Description
In this session Ben and Rob will share their experiences implementing an oral exam system to assess student projects in a lower division quantitative course (WFC 70: Data Literacy for Wildlife Biologists). This course includes a substantial project in which students find a data set, identify research questions, and use the programming language R to analyze and visualize their data and write up their results. A course grade of "A" can only be achieved with an excellent project, but we allow repeated revisions of the project during the quarter. However, by strongly emphasizing the project, this scheme creates high stakes and has some risk of students outsourcing their learning and work to AI. To address this, we included a triaged oral exam in the project grading, meeting for 5 minutes with each student to have them walk us through their methods and reasoning. If a student could not demonstrate full competency with their work, we followed up with additional meetings. We look forward to discussing the method's successes and challenges, learning about approaches that others have tried, and brainstorming adjustments to optimize the balance between student motivation, valid assessment, and reasonable instructor workload.
About the Presenters
Rob Furrow is an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology. He teaches a range of introductory wildlife and quantitative courses, and is interested in how alternative grading schemes can improve student learning and experiences while making the instructor's life more pleasant as well. He is particularly excited about building student confidence with quantitative material such as statistics and programming. When he's not teaching, Rob is usually out birding or at home cooking with family and friends.
Ben J. Rivera is a plant ecologist and current Ph.D. candidate in the Magney Lab at UC Davis. Originally, he is from Oregon. He did his undergraduate degree at Kalamazoo College (go hornets!) where he studied an imperiled dune thistle under the guidance of Dr. Binney Girdler. Drs. Mike Jenkins and Rick Meilan guided him in the completion of his Master’s degree at Purdue University where he studied how an archetypal invasive shrub invades new ecosystems, how to remove it more with less herbicide, and what happens once it is removed. Here at UC Davis, in between teaching and mentoring the students he adores, he studies coastal dune plant community assembly and works with a tribal land trust on indigenous knowledge, ethnobotany, and restoration.
