Impact of Perceived Stress During Oral Examination on Student Performance Outcomes

Perceived stress plays an important role in student performance during examinations. There has been substantial research on how examinations impact students' emotional experiences in diverse academic contexts in connection to validity, reliability, and equity of assessment. The potential of some exams to produce increased anxiety in a portion of students has been recognized as a serious threat to these three assessment attributes. In light of this, the need for further studies on the impact of perceived stress on student performance is critical with the recent rise in interest in oral examinations as an assessment tool for large undergraduate courses. This paper reports on the perceived stress associated with written examinations and oral examinations in the same courses. Building on our prior frameworks for conducting oral examinations, we assess student perceived stress associated with written and oral examinations based on self-reported surveys from over 450 students. Methods to reduce the negative impact of stress on students in the context of oral examinations were implemented. Our results show that perceived stress for oral assessments are consistently lower than written exams for both performance-based credit and participation-based credit courses. Other contributing influences such as language proficiency were found not to significantly affect perceived stress level using Kruskal-Wallis analysis. In this work we also investigated the relationships between student background, gender, GPA and perceived stress during written and oral assessments. Overall, our work provides a strong case for oral examinations as a form of assessment in large undergraduate classrooms by addressing concerns surrounding student perceived stress levels caused by oral examinations.