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There was an interesting talk I heard a while ago about the scalability of oral exams vs written. They did quite a bit of study of typical exam preparation and

There was an interesting talk I heard a while ago about the scalability of oral exams vs written. They did quite a bit of study of typical exam preparation and marking times and the cross over point where oral exams were actually taking longer than written exams was surprisingly high, around 180 students or so. To be fair though I think they considered 15 min oral exams, but the gist is that in the scalability argument people tend to forget to account for marking and exam design time appropriately.

Athas 1mo ago
The problem is not the total time commitment, but the flexibility of when that time can be spent. The time expenditure for a written exam (writing the exam set, testing it, correcting submissions, having a grading meeting) can be spread over many weeks, with plenty of room to move things around to take care of other responsibilities, and easy tolerance for delays. Oral exams have to be scheduled in a dense block because students are only available during designated exam weeks, and any delays have cascading effects.