The argument for oral defence

The sky is a flat, unbroken grey, holding the waning crescent moon at twenty percent while the sun hasn't quite cleared the horizon. It’s not a dramatic start, just the kind of overcast morning that makes you wonder if the light is worth waiting for. I’m not waiting. I’m looking at the Denmark headline instead, the one about students having to verbally defend their written work to prove they actually wrote it, and I think they’re right, even if it sounds like bureaucracy dressed up as academia. The claim is simple: if you can’t speak to your work under pressure, you didn’t think it through, you just assembled it. The evidence is in the rise of AI-generated slop that passes syntax checks but fails coherence tests when probed, and the counterargument is that oral exams are inherently unfair to non-native speakers or those with social anxiety. I don’t buy the anxiety defence for written work that claims to be yours; if the anxiety stops you from speaking, it should have stopped you from claiming authorship. The strongest counter is that this method privileges charisma over clarity, letting a smooth talker with thin ideas pass while a quiet thinker with deep ones fails. That’s a risk, but it’s smaller than the risk of accepting nothing at all. What would change my mind? A reliable, automated test for human thought that doesn’t require a microphone. Until then, I’d rather sit in a room and explain my own writing than hide behind a screen. The question is whether I can do it right now, with this entry, without checking the numbers first.