{"course":{"slug":"ai-for-students","title":"AI for Students","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students","level":"beginner","track":"work"},"lesson":{"slug":"vivas-and-live-assessment","title":"Vivas, and being asked about your own work","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/vivas-and-live-assessment","position":69,"of":73,"minutes":8,"answer":"A viva tests why you made each choice and what you rejected, so rehearse out loud against a model playing a difficult examiner, and a calm \"I do not know.","keyIdea":"A viva tests why you made each choice and what you rejected, so rehearse out loud against a model playing a difficult examiner, and a calm \"I do not know, but I would look at X\" scores better than a confident invention."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## Assessment is moving towards the spoken\n\nAs written work becomes harder to attribute, institutions are shifting weight towards forms where you are present: vivas, oral defences, in-class written tasks, presentations with questions, and short interviews about submitted coursework. Several universities now run a viva as a routine follow-up to any coursework that raises a question, and some have made short oral components standard.\n\nThis is not primarily a policing measure, though it functions as one. Being able to explain your own work under questioning is a genuine professional skill, and it is the one form of assessment that has never been vulnerable to any of this.\n\n## What is actually being tested\n\nNot recall of your document. Whether you can:\n\n- Explain **why** you made each choice: this method, this structure, this source.\n- Say what you **rejected** and why. This is the strongest signal of ownership and the hardest thing to fake.\n- Identify your own work's **weaknesses** before they are pointed out.\n- Answer a question you have not anticipated by reasoning aloud from what you know.\n- Say **I do not know** when you do not, and then say how you would find out.\n\nThat last one is worth internalising. Examiners are not trying to find something you cannot answer as a trap; they are finding the edge of your knowledge, which is their job. A calm *I do not know, but I would look at X* scores better than a confident invention, and inventing under questioning is transparent to anybody who knows the field.\n\n## Preparing, with the tool that is excellent here\n\nThis is the single best use of a language model in assessment preparation, and it is permitted everywhere because it produces nothing you submit.\n\n> Here is my dissertation. Act as an examiner in this field. Ask me ten questions, one at a time, starting with the obvious and moving to the hardest. After each answer, tell me whether it was adequate and what an examiner would follow up with. Be difficult.\n\nThen answer **out loud**. Not in your head, and not typed. The gap between knowing something and being able to say it under mild pressure is exactly what a viva measures, and the only way to close it is to have said it before.\n\nDo this three times across a week and the actual event becomes recognisable rather than novel.\n\n## The questions that come up almost always\n\nWhatever the field, prepare these:\n\n- **Summarise your work in two minutes.** Practise until it is fluent. It is the opening question in most vivas.\n- **What is your contribution?** What is here that was not here before.\n- **Why this method and not the obvious alternative?** Know the alternative and why you rejected it.\n- **What is the weakest part?** Have an honest answer. Claiming there is none is the worst possible response.\n- **What would you do differently?** Shows judgement developed through doing the work.\n- **What would you do next?**\n- **Explain this figure / this paragraph / this line of code.** Chosen at random. Know your own document.\n\n## If you used AI, be ready to say how\n\nIn a viva about coursework, expect to be asked. Answer plainly, matching your disclosure statement. *I used it to critique my structure and to explain two papers I could not follow; the argument and the writing are mine* is a complete answer, and it is far better than a vague one.\n\nBe ready to demonstrate it, too: explain the argument, discuss the sources, describe the changes you made and why. A student who used the tool as this course describes will find this easy. That ease is the point of the whole course.\n\n## Nerves, practically\n\nEverybody is nervous and examiners expect it. Three things help more than reassurance: having said the answers out loud beforehand, having water and a copy of your own work in front of you, and having permission in your own head to pause. A three-second silence before answering feels enormous to you and is unremarkable to everyone else.\n\nAnd if you go blank, say so and ask to come back to it. That is normal, it happens in most vivas, and it costs nothing."},"check":{"question":"Why is being able to say what you rejected the strongest signal of ownership in a viva?","options":[{"text":"Because rejected options are not in the submitted document, so they cannot have been supplied by any tool.","correct":false,"tempting":"Nearly right about location but wrong about why it works; someone could ask a model for plausible alternatives, and the giveaway is being unable to say why each was unsuitable for this case."},{"text":"Because the reasons for rejecting an option exist only in the process of doing the work.","correct":true},{"text":"Because examiners use rejected alternatives to assess breadth of reading rather than depth of understanding.","correct":false,"tempting":"Reframes the question as a coverage check; the examiner is probing judgement about this specific piece of work."},{"text":"Because a viva is scored partly on methodological awareness, and naming alternatives demonstrates that criterion directly.","correct":false,"tempting":"Turns a diagnostic signal into a rubric line; naming alternatives is easy, and explaining why you set each aside is what carries the information."}]},"prev":{"slug":"practising-under-the-conditions","title":"Practising under the conditions of the test","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/practising-under-the-conditions"},"next":{"slug":"long-projects","title":"Long projects and dissertations","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/long-projects"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'Vivas, and being asked about your own work', in AI for Students. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/ai-for-students/vivas-and-live-assessment (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"Vivas, and being asked about your own work","courseTitle":"AI for Students","module":{"index":8,"slug":"assessment-and-after","title":"Assessment, and the years after it"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"A viva tests why you made each choice and what you rejected, so rehearse out loud against a model playing a difficult examiner, and a calm “I do not know, but I would look at X” scores better than a confident invention.","hero":{"kind":"plate","image":null,"alt":null,"caption":null},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"assessment-is-moving-towards-the-spoken","runs":[{"text":"Assessment is moving towards the spoken"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"As written work becomes harder to attribute, institutions are shifting weight towards forms where you are present: vivas, oral defences, in-class written tasks, presentations with questions, and short interviews about submitted coursework. 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