The single biggest predictor of how an oral check goes is not the software, the rubric, or the questions. It is what the students believed was happening when they walked in.
Three sentences to avoid
"This is to make sure nobody is cheating." Now every student in the room is a suspect, including the thirty who were not doing anything. Anxiety goes up, and you have framed a learning activity as an enforcement action.
"Don't worry, it's easy." Some of them will find it hard, and when they do they will conclude something is wrong with them.
"An AI will interview you." True and unhelpfully alarming without context. Students hear an evaluation they cannot appeal to a person.
What to say instead
Something close to this, in week one, before any assessment is attached to it.
"After you hand in the next assignment, you will have a short conversation about it. Five minutes, about your own work, with the work in front of you. Nothing to revise for. I read the transcript afterwards and I set the grade. The point is that I get to see your thinking, not just your document, and that has been missing from how I assess you."
Then answer the four questions they will have anyway.
- What if I freeze? You can pause, and you can ask for a question again. Nobody is grading fluency.
- Is it recorded? Yes, and here is who can see it and for how long.
- What if my internet drops? It resumes, and if it cannot, you get a fresh one.
- What if this format is genuinely a problem for me? Come and see me. There is an alternative and using it changes nothing about your grade.
Every one of those answers is about giving the student a way out that does not cost them anything. Where that exists, the anxiety mostly evaporates.
Give them a free one
The strongest thing you can do is run a practice round that carries no marks, on a low-stakes piece of work, in the second or third week. It is worth more than any amount of explanation. Students who have done one describe the graded version as unremarkable, which is exactly the goal.
Expect the first week to be noisy
A few students will have microphone problems. One will do it in a corridor. Someone will discover the conversation is genuinely about their own work and be visibly rattled by how specific the questions are. That last one is the format working, and it is worth telling the class in advance that the questions come from what they wrote rather than from a bank.
By the second round it stops being an event. That is the point at which the thing starts paying off, both for you and for them.