Oral Assessment
Get Custom Insights Into Your Students’ Learning, at Scale
Solo oral assessments—customizable, scalable, and evaluated by AI using your exact standards.
Traditional Written Exams Have Serious Limitations
AI has made written exams unreliable.
Students can generate essay responses with ChatGPT. You're spending hours grading work that may not be theirs. Teachers are resorting to bringing back Blue Books.
Written exams can't assess everything that matters.
Communication skills, ability to think on your feet, responding to challenges—none of this shows up in a timed essay.
Grading takes forever.
Hours reading exams, trying to stay consistent across responses, manually applying rubrics to every answer.
How Oral Assessment Works
Your Content
Base the assessment on any course material—readings, lectures, case studies, conceptual frameworks. Students demonstrate understanding of the content you've taught.
Your Questions
You design the exam questions and prompts. What concepts should students explain? What scenarios should they analyze? What problems should they solve? The assessment measures exactly what you want.
Your Rubrics
You define the evaluation criteria using our unique rubric design method—completely customizable to your learning objectives. The AI doesn't independently assess students; it assists you in administering your assessment by applying your standards consistently across every student.
Solo Oral Format
Students answer questions through structured prompts that guide them through your assessment. They respond verbally to your questions, explaining their reasoning and demonstrating understanding in real-time.
AI-Powered Evaluation
AI evaluates student responses against your customized rubrics. The AI applies your exact standards consistently. You control what gets assessed, how it's weighted, and what constitutes excellent performance. Students receive targeted, specific feedback on their performance—precise input on what they did well and where they fell short. Detailed performance analytics and immediate results with no hours of manual grading.
What Makes Oral Assessment Different
Authentic Evaluation
Students must think in real-time. They can't rehearse perfect answers or use AI to write responses. What you assess is what they actually know.
Assess What You Want
Your rubrics can evaluate anything: conceptual understanding, application skills, analytical thinking, evidence-based reasoning—you decide what matters.
AI Assists, You Control
The AI doesn't make independent judgments. It applies your rubric criteria exactly as you've defined them, ensuring consistency across all students at scale.
Scalable and Efficient
AI evaluation makes oral assessment practical for large courses. No need to schedule individual meetings or spend hours listening to recordings—the platform handles administration and scoring using your standards. Students get specific, actionable feedback at scale that would be impossible to provide manually.
How Students Experience It
Students work through oral assessments individually, responding to structured prompts based on your questions. They articulate their understanding verbally, explain their reasoning, and demonstrate mastery through spoken responses—all evaluated against the rubrics you've designed.
Perfect For
Practice Midterms and Finals
Give students a practice exam experience before high-stakes tests. Let them rehearse explaining concepts verbally and get feedback on their reasoning—ideal for formative assessment and exam preparation.
Formative Assessment Throughout the Semester
Use oral assessments as low-stakes checkpoints to gauge understanding and identify areas needing reinforcement. Better suited for formative rather than summative evaluation.
Comprehensive Reviews
Assess student mastery across multiple concepts and modules through integrated verbal responses.
Case Analysis
Have students verbally analyze cases, defend recommendations, and respond to challenges.
Problem-Solving Assessments
Students work through complex problems in real-time, explaining their reasoning as they go.
Seamless LMS Integration
Schedule oral assessments directly in Canvas or Brightspace D2L. Students access through your existing course site. Results and grades sync automatically—no manual data transfer.
What Instructors Are Saying
“Those who used [Breakout] did significantly better than those who did not, about one full standard deviation better on the midterm…”
Faculty Director Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation
Professor of Strategy Joseph Jacobs Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies UCLA Anderson School of Management
Dramatically reduced
concerns about AI-assisted cheating
More meaningful insights
into student understanding than written exams ever provided
Scalable to large courses
without sacrificing assessment quality
What Students Are Saying
“The most useful part of the verbal practice in my opinion is that it for some reason triggered this social pressure in me (due to speaking aloud as if talking with a real person) to have a stronger grasp of the material, because I otherwise felt more embarrassed being unclear on any topics during the verbal practice as opposed to the printed practice problems.”
UCLA, Anderson Student
Case Study:
How Olav Turned His Venture Capital Midterm into an Oral Practice Exam
In Dr. Olav Sorenson’s venture capital course, traditional take-home midterms and short written answers no longer felt viable in a ChatGPT world. He rebuilt part of his assessment strategy by offering a practice oral exam on Breakout, where students talk through their valuation reasoning step by step instead of just submitting a final number. Students who chose to use the practice tool performed a full standard deviation better on the actual exam.
The Power of Saying It Out Loud:
Social Pressure & Deeper Prep
Speaking answers out loud changes how students prepare. One of Olav’s students described feeling “social pressure” to truly understand the material when walking through their reasoning verbally, as if talking to a real person, rather than quietly working a problem set. When students know they’ll be in a small-group discussion, they spend more time with the material — not because of points alone, but because they don’t want to be the one who shows up with nothing meaningful to contribute.
Designing Rubrics:
Let AI Grade Like a Good Professor
Olav walks through how he built rubrics that don’t just check if students got the “right” answer, but credit the key steps in their reasoning. By layering process-based criteria into his existing problems and answer keys, he’s able to let AI reliably evaluate both outcome and approach, giving students clear insight into where their thinking went off track and effectively “tutoring at scale” for large classes.