The Viva Blog

Thinking about learning,
understanding, and trust

Perspectives on oral assessment, AI in education, academic integrity, and the future of how we verify what students actually know.

Academic Integrity

Why AI detection is the wrong solution to the right problem

Similarity scores and AI detectors answer "Did this student write this?" — but the question that actually matters is "Does this student understand this?" Those require very different tools.

Viva Team · April 2025 · 6 min readComing soon
AI in Education

The oral examination: humanity's oldest assessment tool is back

Socrates didn't use rubrics. The viva voce has been the gold standard for deep assessment for millennia. Here's why AI is finally making it scale to every classroom.

Viva Team · March 2025 · 8 min readComing soon
Research

What 1,200 conversations taught us about authentic understanding

After our first year of deployment across 40+ schools, we analyzed patterns in how students speak about their own work — and what those patterns reveal that written assessment cannot.

Viva Research · February 2025 · 10 min readComing soon
Pedagogy

Feedback that students actually read — and remember

Written feedback lives in a comment box. Spoken feedback from a conversation you just had lives in your memory. We look at the evidence on why verbal feedback lands differently.

Viva Team · January 2025 · 5 min readComing soon
Product

Introducing the Viva Card: a verified credential students can own

A grade on a transcript tells you what a student scored. A Viva Card tells you what they can demonstrate. Here's why we built a portable, shareable, verifiable record of oral performance.

Viva Team · December 2024 · 4 min readComing soon
AI in Education

Designing for trust: how we think about AI's role in assessment

AI should augment teacher judgment, not replace it. Every design decision in Viva starts with the question: does this make teachers more capable, or does it make them redundant?

Viva Team · November 2024 · 7 min readComing soon

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