Peer Reviewing for Oral Presentations?

Everyone who has attended a conference knows that the quality of the talks is very uneven. There are talks that are highly engaging, entertaining, and describe nicely the research challenges and solutions. And there are talks that are a waste of time. Either the presenter cannot present clearly, or the presented content is impossible to digest within the time frame of the presentation.

So, my question is: Why don't we have peer reviewing for oral presentations? 

We already have reviewing for the written part. The program committee examines the quality of the written paper and vouch for its technical content. However, by looking at a paper it is impossible to know how nicely it can be presented. Perhaps the seemingly solid but boring paper can be a very entertaining presentation. Or an excellent paper may be written by a horrible presenter.

Why not having a second round of reviewing, where the authors of accepted papers submit their presentations (slides and a YouTube video) for presentation to the conference. The paper will be accepted and be included in the proceedings anyway but having a paper does not mean that the author gets a slot for an oral presentation.

Under an oral presentation peer review, a committee looks at the presentation, votes on accept/reject and potentially provides feedback to the presenter. The best presentations get a slot on the conference program. This also allows the conference to accept more papers that are worthy of inclusion to the proceedings, without worrying about capacity constraints. 

Some other side benefits of this scheme:

• Presentations are accessible in an archival format
• Authors have hard incentives to be better presenters
• The time of the attendees in conferences is not wasted in clearly sub-par presentations.

And if someone says that this system is biased towards good and sleek presenters, I would argue that the system is already biased towards good authors. A well-written paper will eventually have a higher impact than one that is badly written. Same thing for presentations.

Learning to communicate properly the results of our research should be a goal, not an afterthought.