High-Stakes Oral Examinations and Grade Inflation: Evidence from a National Cohort of Romanian Psychology Graduates

Oral examinations are widely used in higher education but remain contested in terms of their reliability, validity, and susceptibility to examiner bias. This study examines their broader, system-level consequences within the national framework governing Romania’s Bachelor’s degree final examination, where an oral defence component is part of the degree awarding process. Drawing on data from the 2025 psychology cohort (N = 1,628; 13 universities), we compare student grades from the proctored written examination with those from the subsequent Bachelor's thesis defence to examine whether oral component systematically distorts final grades and rankings. Using a Bayesian multilevel zero–one-inflated beta model, the results show a large, cohort-wide oral-stage uplift of approximately 1.8 points on a 1–10 scale (d = 1.64), together with a sharp increase in perfect scores (from under 1% to over 55%), compressing distinctions among top students. Oral-stage related grade inflation is consistent across programmes and is largest for candidates with lower written performance, indicating a compensatory mechanism rather than discriminatory pattern. Results suggest that, under a high-stakes, unstructured format, oral examinations systematically and significantly increase grades and are associated with significant student rank reshuffling. The findings carry direct implications for assessment fairness, validity evidence, and ongoing regulatory reforms in Romania and other, comparable higher-education systems.