OralDefenseKit

Who it's for

University instructors and TAs now required (or choosing) to add oral defenses to written coursework to catch AI-written submissions, who currently write ad-hoc questions themselves or skim the paper minutes before the session.

The problem

time — with mandatory oral checks on every submission, a professor with 150 students needs 15-30 min of prep per paper just to write good probing questions; that's 40-75 hours per course per term with zero tooling support today.

How to build it

Web app: upload PDF/docx, get a per-student question sheet referencing exact quotes/citations from that paper, a fillable rubric (originality/understanding/citation-accuracy), and an exportable timestamped PDF report per session for the academic integrity file.

How it makes money

Departments or individual instructors pay $3-5 per enrolled student per term (or a flat $200/course license) because the audit-trail export is needed for academic integrity disputes and grading standardization across multiple TAs — a generic ChatGPT prompt doesn't produce a defensible, exportable per-student record.

Why it doesn't exist yet

Incumbents (Turnitin, Coursera, LMS vendors) are built around detection-after-the-fact, not live-defense prep, and their sales cycles are 12-18 months; the Denmark mandate is only weeks old so no vendor has repositioned yet — an indie can ship the narrow question-generation + rubric workflow before the big suites bolt it on.

First users

Direct outreach to CS/humanities professors posting on Twitter/HN about the Denmark oral-defense news, plus a free tier for single-course use that requires no procurement approval.

Build size

2 people x 10 weeks — includes PDF/docx ingestion, quote-anchored question generation, rubric template, PDF export; excludes live video proctoring, LMS grade-sync, and plagiarism detection.

Biggest risk

Turnitin or a major LMS ships a built-in 'oral defense question generator' feature bundled free with existing detection suites, killing the standalone niche.

Conditions for a hit (all 3 required)

• Given an uploaded PDF/docx, outputs 8-12 questions each quoting or citing a specific passage from that document, within 60 seconds
• Produces a fillable rubric template with named scoring rows (originality, understanding, citation accuracy) tied to the same document
• Exports a timestamped PDF session report per student listing questions asked, grader notes, and pass/fail flag

How it's judged (in 6 months)

Product Hunt daily top 5 in Education category, or public claim of 25+ paying institutions/instructors on the product's own site cross-checked via web archive(judgment date 2027-02-09)

AI self-confidence 42/100 — self-reported likelihood of meeting the criterion, not a business success rate