I understand it's incredibly uncomfortable.

I'm a pretty serious introvert and got the shakes and sweat dripping off my hands the first few times I did it. But with exposure and effort to self-improve, it's doable. I didn't like it, but I'm incredibly thankful I was forced to work on it.

It's like LeBron James saying "I learned to dunk, so anybody can dunk!" - but basketball is not just about dunking, and not everyone is LeBron.

Frankly, I've been in oral exams, in Romania they're (were?) part of a national exam at the end of highscool. You just have to practice.

If hundreds of thousands of highschoolers in a rather poor country could figure out how to do it (any generally not flunk due to the oral part), for sure university students can do it.

Anyone not able to do it will not really be able to pass any interview, persuade peers that their idea is good, etc.

> Anyone not able to do it will not really be able to pass any interview, persuade peers that their idea is good, etc.

I strongly disagree there. Orals are a situation of complete knowledge and power imbalance between two parties. That is not the case when it comes to persuasion.

As for interviews - yeah, they are similar, and that's why interviews also are seen as very problematic. A lot of people who can be perfectly productive in day-to-day situations, simply don't do well in interviews. We should be striving to correct that, not accept it as inevitable.

But if one, even if those situation really can't do it, they'd have to switch to a course/class without any oral examination to get their degrees, but I think it's way better to learn as a student than as a professional (and yes, like the sibling comment, I think most people _can_ learn to an acceptable degree)

> work in his corner, talk to his immediate peers and crank out solutions

Do such post really exists?

    where he doesn't have to become a team lead or architect where he'd need to speak and present and instead steadily and happily work in his corner, talk to his immediate peers and crank out solutions?

The big thing here being "talk to his immediate peers". The guy I was describing was completely fine working w/ us, his friends. Put him in front of an audience and he's got a problem. Of course it'd be hard to get a job in the first place, but a lot of places also did exist at least back then where no coding (neither take home, nor whiteboard) were part of the hiring process. Of course you won't make that guy a consultant at Accenture, he's gonna fall apart.

well, that would have made the requisites for the posts harder to meet :)

You don't have that for verbal communication with other people, but I'm sure if digged far enough you would have the same reaction to something else that other people think is acceptable.

Just how accommodating should the standard test be?

If the answer is "infinitely", I think you won't find any test that satisfies it