Answers · Fairness & data

How is Viva fair to ESL and multilingual students?

Understanding is scored; language production is not. And you can run the interview in another language entirely.

808 reads
  • Grammar, vocabulary range and fluency are not part of any score.
  • An answer that arrives slowly, in simple words, with the right reasoning, scores as a correct answer.
  • The interview can run in Korean instead of English, per assignment. More languages are coming soon.
  • Extra time and no time pressure can be granted per student, or as a class-wide default for a language-support section.
  • The interviewer is instructed to use plain words rather than idioms, which removes a barrier that has nothing to do with the subject.

For a class with many multilingual students, turning on practice interviews for the first assignment makes a visible difference.

This is one page of the documentation inside Viva.

Instructors get the rest — the walkthroughs, the screenshots, and Ask Viva, which finds the right page from a typed question.