Midday seems to be the optimal time to take an oral exam at university, which could be due to students not generally being early risers
By Chris Stokel-Walker
24 July 2025
Certain university courses, such as languages, have oral examinations
Shutterstock/PeopleImages.com – Yuri A
University students are more likely to pass oral exams if they are taken at around midday, according to a study of more than 100,000 assessments.
Carmelo Vicario at the University of Messina, Italy, was inspired to investigate this after coming across a study that suggests judges’ decisions are affected by how close it is to a mealtime. “I was trying to see if this could be true in education,” says Vicario.
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With his colleagues, Vicario combed through a public database to gather information on the outcomes and timings of more than 104,500 oral assessments taken by around 19,000 university students in Italy. The tests happened between October 2018 and February 2020 and were from 1243 courses.
They found that, on average, pass rates were 54 per cent at 8am, rising to 72 per cent by midday and then dropping to 51 per cent by 4pm. “We found this beautiful, bell-shaped distribution of data,” says Vicario.
This was consistent across all types of oral assessments, such as language exams and research presentations. But Vicario acknowledges that we don’t know if it also applies to written tests.