"I decided we would do an oral exam* because it's a great way to see if people have actually learned anything from my course and aren't just parroting notes. Because I can ask them to elaborate on their answers."
Yeah and it's also a great way to get otherwise good students to go blank because it isn't possible to absorb every bit of complex information you spent 12 weeks rushing through, Barbara.
This "gotcha" style teaching fucking pisses me off. There is no time in the real world people are not going to be able to look up their notes. Fuck, half the time I'll ask a professor something and they'll be like "I'll have to look that up later and get back to you." Why? BECAUSE THEY'RE HUMAN AND THATS HOW BRAINS ARE.
This type of teaching only favours students that already had experience with the subject beforehand and freaks with amazing memories. This kind of understanding of the material only comes from experience and repetition, something that the traditional 12 weeks of rushed lectures/labs that discard each topic quickly to fit all of them in don't do.
I fucking hate how much I am going into debt to be taught only the vaguest concepts but doing most of the teaching myself in my own time. Education under capitalism is a joke.
*An oral exam is an exam where instead of answering questions in a quiet room on paper, you have to answer questions on a live video call with your instructor.
Sometimes it's because the Professors (who are, yes awful) feel there's a minimum level of knowledge to be taught and that's the barrier. Which might be fair, if University were free. And there are courses I struggled at because I didn't have to learn appropriate prerequisites that aren't usually taught until 2nd-3rd year (Partial Differential Equations and stuff beyond, mostly)
Ideally you could have 6-7 year BSc-Beng courses for difficult courses where it really is required to learn advanced math to even start learning the subject. Not every subject takes the same time to learn to a Bachelor's level and not every person, even extremely smart people, learn at the same pace.
To illustrate, the working class scientist Michael Faraday famously went through almost everything Maxwell did in electromagnetism in a qualitative way but his struggles with manipulating even basic arithmetic crippled his progress towards a unified theory (he might have done an end run around the Aether concept with just a bit of trigonometry). Imagine if he'd had another decade to work on it instead of having to get a job as an apprentice at age 14.
But see "free university" as a prerequisite for that.