Well, it was in an Swiss university and I'm Spanish so I'm not sure if American oratorion had anything to do with it.

But, in general, oral communication is harder than written. Written form allows you to take time to form sentences, correct mistakes, reorder thoughts, follow an outline... Oral communication, on the other hand, forces you to think and speak in parallel. It's always going to be harder.

Viva voce was a substantial part of my final in Applied Physics at Exeter Uni. in 1977. It was nerve wracking but it was on a specific subject, my final year project on electron spin resonance, so I wasn't having to invent a long speech on the fly, just defend my conclusions, experimental methods, and analysis against critical but not hostile questioning.

In my opinion such examinations and written finals succeed in filtering out people who can only regurgitate what they have been spoon fed in class rather than being able to use that information to move forward. I think I was lucky to study when and where I did, it stood me in good stead in industry.

Of course there are some people who really do find such examinations difficult. In my opinion the solution is to provide assistance to those people to do better rather than throw the baby out with the bath water.

An oral defense of a project you’ve made is a very different matter from an oral examination of a course, where the expectation is to have far more breadth than depth of knowledge. I’ve had no problem with oral defenses of projects and thesis, but exams are completely different, you’re not really able to prepare at the same level (and you usually have several exams to prepare)