Beta — available to participating partners. See Oral Assessment & Practice: Beta Feedback and Known Limitations.
What is Oral Assessment?
Oral Assessment lets you run live, summative oral assessments inside your LMS. A student and one or more human assessors meet in a live conversation, scaffolded by the topics and questions you configure upfront. Everything is recorded and transcribed automatically, so you can review, give feedback, and grade afterwards — just like other FeedbackFruits activities.
The assessor always leads the conversation: there is no AI voice in an Oral Assessment. Acai supports you around the conversation — with question suggestions during the session and highlights and grading suggestions afterwards — but never speaks to the student and never decides a grade.
Setting up Oral Assessment as a teacher
- Add the activity in your LMS and write your instructions.
- Configure the topics and questions for the assessment. These apply cohort-wide, so every student gets a consistent scaffold. You decide beforehand which material students see.
- Attach a rubric if you want to assess against criteria.
- Decide whether to include a submission step. If you do, the submitted work is shown as context during the assessment.
Default feedback modules
Oral Assessment includes two connected modules by default: Teachers give feedback to student work (your view) and Received feedback (the student’s view). They are added as a set and can only be removed together. They are optional, and can be replaced with Peer Review if that suits your design better.
Running a live assessment
Students and assessors join the live conversation from the activity. In the Beta:
- Multiple assessors can join the same session.
- The optional Conversation Assistant suggests questions and follow-ups during the session. Suggestions are visible to assessors only — students never see them.
During the Beta, support for scheduling is limited: there is no built-in scheduling yet, so agree on a time with your students through your usual channels. Group assessments are not yet available — we will support assessing groups of students in a later release.
Assessing in the same room
If you and the student are in the same physical room, have both devices join the session but use one shared microphone — preferably the student’s device. The recording is stored as a single combined audio track, so the transcript may not always attribute speakers correctly. This does not affect your ability to review and grade the session.
Reviewing and grading
After the session you can:
- Play back the recording alongside the full transcript, and click any point in the transcript to jump there.
- Search the transcript by keyword.
- Use Acai session highlights — timestamped links to notable moments. Highlights are navigation suggestions only; they contain no judgment or score.
- Give feedback through the feedback modules. Timestamped feedback on specific moments in the recording is not available during the Beta.
- Use the Acai Grade Assistant in the assignment review step for a draft grading suggestion. You always review, adjust, and decide the final grade — Acai never grades autonomously.
- Return grades to your LMS gradebook.
Student experience
Students open the activity in their LMS on a phone, tablet, or desktop, grant camera and microphone access, and join the conversation at the agreed time. If a submission step is included, they submit their work beforehand and it is available as context during the assessment. Afterwards, they receive your feedback through the Received feedback module.