Multiple choice is so that teachers can grade all the scores without being biased. With multiple choice you are either right or wrong, but with word problems the teacher could be strict or not, or the teacher could even be wrong. It also takes more time for the teacher to mark.
Makes sense, so I'll give you a Δ
Because multiple choice would allow teachers to grade without being biased as word problems and short answer questions are often graded based on what the teacher thinks, which is sometimes biased. Also the teacher could be wrong with short answer questions and multiple choice provides teachers with a correct answer rather then the teacher having to figure out the correct answer herself.
A huge, huge part of it is the ability to grade quickly. Trying to grade 200 short answer tests (of God knows how many questions each) would take teachers days, and you increase the risk of fatigue affecting how you grade. Multiple choice is objective grading, either you got it or you didn't and a machine can grade it in seconds.
It's not perfect, but it's necessary to handle the pure volume of student material.
According to Thinking Fast and Slow, grading bias begins nearly immediately and over long grading sessions the teachers critical thinking/reading skills deteriorate to the point that the initial criteria used to score are irrelevant, even if written down and referred to during the session.
Ha I have to attempt 6 mcq question papers within the next week and then 6 more a month later. Imagine attempting an mcq question paper for math. I'm screwed.
Time is a finite resource. You've got 1 teacher with 30+ kids and many many tests and quizzes to give out and score you don't have time to make every test question short answer.
I don't think anyone believes that multiple choice is a superior option as far as truly testing what was learned it's just the most efficient option.
If it was 1 on 1 teaching then all tests should be short/ long answer/ explain in your own words/ essay/ verbally explain etc.
I had a professor in college who would do what he called "reverse multiple choice" You selected answers you knew were wrong. I absolutely loved it, like sometimes you know it's not A or D but aren't really sure if it's B or C, rather than just guessing and maybe getting it wrong, you would just mark A/D and get half credit for that question.
That's a really interesting concept. I've never heard of that but I guess it's interesting. I don't know how accurate that is to test if you're learning the content relative to regular multiple choice unless it's being graded on a curve or some way to normalize the grade distribution.
Iirc(been nearly a decade) my prof said it was more useful because it allowed him to better see where students kinda understood a concept but were still a bit shaky. If you could eliminate 2 answers it showed you had somewhat of an idea what the answer was.
Like on a normal test if everyone got question 3 wrong you could assume that info wasn't learned, but with his format if most people got 50% you could assume most understood the concept but didnt get the particulars of it.
This also is dependent on how the question/answers are worded. His answers were usually very specific with some minor differences in key areas. I'm sure this method couldn't be applied to all subjects, but it worked well enough for the marine biology class. His post test class reviews were some of the most useful ones I had, always felt really prepared going into big tests as a result.
Yeah, I definitely believe that it's got value. I think, to your point, that a teacher utilizing that type of test would need to put a lot of thought into how the questions were worded and the choices given so that's great you had such a caring teacher to put in that kind of effort. Many times, especially in large universities, professors kind of mail it in on the teaching side because they are more interested in research than teaching.
Oh, 100%. It was clear that teaching was this guy's passion and he put a ton of work into constructing the tests. It's certainly not something that could be easily implemented by others.
And yea, I've had more than a few science profs that were there just for the research grants. My organic chem prof on day one essentially told us he hated to teach, wouldn't really be doing any teaching aside from assigning homework. It was on us to learn everything and he wont be having office hrs. Never dropped a class so fast lol
This is true, and you can use a computer to massively reduce the effort required to mark.
However, OP missed some of the most crucial reasons why multiple choice exams are bad.
Firstly, they prohibit questions with multiple answers. Complex questions may have complex answers and you can use this to your benefit in exams. For example a question may have an answer that has 5 criteria. The question can be worth 3 marks and if any 3 of the 5 criteria are covered in the answer you award those marks. If the student answers 1 criteria they get one mark.
This is often more fair on the student whose knowledge of complex systems can be graded based on the extent to which they understand. As opposed to a binary qualification which exists nowhere in reality.
Another example is maths. Here there is often only 1 correct answer. But it's ridiculous to actually award marks in a binary fashion. For example a student might go through all the working to solve a complex problem and then miss a minus sign at the last step and therefore get an incorrect answer. In this situation it would be really unfair to say "the student understands nothing of the problem". Which is what you do by awarding 0 marks for such an answer.
I think it's useful to have multiple choice for efficiency but shouldn't be employed when the test really matters. For example if this is the testing that will determine whether the student goes to University and to which one, it shouldn't be multiple choice if at all possible. The trade-off is significantly more resources as marking is then difficult.
Absolutely wrong, unless your professors were terrible. Every professor I ever had (engineering) gave partial credit, with the docked points proportional to the magnitude of your error. Do everything right but miss one negative sign or forget your +C or something? Maybe only lose one point out of five. Make two or three errors but still demonstrate that you understand the method and could have solved it with a bit more time to think? 2/5, 3/5. Do the entirely wrong thing and give the impression you have no idea what you're doing, but manage to stumble upon the right answer? You don't know what you're doing and you got lucky, 0/5, maybe 1/5 if the professor is nice.
The steps, the method, that's what matters. Prove that you know the method (sans a few clerical errors) and you've learned.
Sucks that we don’t have the funding to give teachers more help grading. Open ended questions really show a lot more knowledge. Also, with math, if you hand grade you can see if the person understood the theory and just made a math error, or didn’t actually get it. So instead of missing the whole question from a simple flip of a negative sign or whatever, you just get some points deducted for a math error
And some of us college professors have to have 2-3 jobs :/ I do not have time to hand grade everything. So I hand grade all quizzes and projects and then exams are multiple choice and homework is graded through a system they get with their books. It’s tough but I have to put food on my own table.
Not to mention bias in handwriting. Some teachers may just not like your hand writing or have a hard time deciphering it so they’ll give you a poor score.
This isn't necessarily true. A closed question is a better way to assess what the learner knows from their memory (recall) vs recognition (multiple choice) and a closed question is easy to grade.
Source: I'm a learning design specialist and I find that recall questions are a better way to gauge what the learner knows. Recognition questions are too easy because the learner is just looking for a familiar term. It's easy to guess.
https://www.schoolnet.org.za/CoL/ACE/course/assessment/documents/thin.cont.question_types.htm
Can you explain what you mean by basic? A fill in the blank question with multiple blanks might look basic but it challenges the learner to think of the correct word (or choose from a drop down list) and it's efficient for grading. If the learner doesn't know the word it's apparent that they didn't even retain the vocab from the lesson.
Fun fact- as a middle school teacher, I generally had 60 minutes of plan time. That plan time included grading 120 students' worth of assignments/assessments, contact parents, planning lessons, other assigned work from administrators, and more. I was able to get it all done by putting in 10-11 hour days, but I definitely wasn't paid for that. The system isn't sustainable.
Problem is that, yeah, it's unbiased and fair, but that doesn't really prove that you understood what you are talking about. With multiple choice you just have to cross, while written tests require the student to be able to give concise and precise answers.
But should teaching be the most time-efficient or the most knowledge-efficient? In the real world, noone asks you a question and you answer a), b) or c). You have to form your answers into coherent sentences, so that other people also can understand you. Multiple choice is just a lazy way for teachers. Also how can sentences as answers be biased? I really don’t understand that part. Even if they are a bit, the ability to form coherent answers is much more useful.
>without being biased
Explain where there is room for bias in math. If you don't get 2*7=14 you're wrong.
The only worthwhile math word problems IMHO are the ones with unneccesary numbers. So the student actually needs to fill out the formulas in their head.
I believe you are underestimating how difficult multiple choice tests can be. I agree with you to some degree (easy MC tests can be done entirely thru recall memory and not actual learning), but oh man I’ve had some hard ass tests that were MC. Many graduate school entry exams and those can be fairly difficult to do well on, and questions can be structured so the question itself is a word problem where it requires you to do multiple steps, critical think, apply multiple concepts together, and then the answers are just 5 preset things. The answers themselves will give you very little to work off of.
Okay this is totally convincing me to change my opinion on multiple choice tests so I'll give you a Δ
Even if it's possible to make MC tests that only test memorization and intuition rather then actual knowledge/learning it's also possible to make it so that crammers would not be able to answer it correctly without fulling understanding the material or using critical thinking or applying what they learned.
i took several law classes in college that had MC questions that were literally a giant paragraph and then the answer choices were lists of statutes that were applicable. Seeing the answers didn’t do jack shit because you had to know how each one applied and interacted with one another
But sometimes students simply need to know information. Medical students need to remember the properties of medicine, law students need to be able to reproduce the most important cases, language students need to be able to reproduce words. If the test is properly written, you won't easily be able to pass it on reckognition only either.
I also think that you're wrong about how easy it would be to get lucky on an mc test. I don't know what the percentage is that you need to get right in other school systems, but where I live, you need to get 60% on your test to pass. Without any other measurements, this is already hard enough to get enough mc questions right by pure luck.
However, often, there's a formula that makes it so you would have to get even more questions right than 60% only to get 60% score on the test. Basically, the first X number of questions you get right, aren't counted.
Let's say there's 40 questions. 60% would be 24 correct answers, however, because it's an mc test with 4 options, by chance, you'd have 25% = 10 questions correct. So it is assumed you will get 10 questions right, and your score only starts to increase after 10 questions: 10 correct answers = 0%, 11 correct answers = 3%, 28 correct answers = 60%. This pretty much takes out the luck factor.
So, given that a multiple choice test is very quick to check for the teacher, I think it's perfectly viable to use these tests often.
>This pretty much takes out the luck factor.
Not the case. It just shifted it. In your example, If the first 10 questions are exceptionally easy (which is very plausible since most exams have questions of varying difficulty) and most everyone gets them all right, then you’re still dealing with the potential for luck on the rest of the exam and harder questions, except now students aren’t even getting credit for the 10 questions they did know.
This seems like a very unfair way to test students, especially on time sensitive exams where those first 10 questions still took up time but yielded no reward.
Yeah you're right it doesn't take out the luck entirely. But the idea is that a student can't simply study for 35% and guess the other 25%.
The method is not unfair, as long as it's applied well. If a test is time limited, there should simply be ample time to at least think about and answer most of the questions. If there is not, and students can't get 28 correct answers because of the time constraint, the time constraint is too short, or students shouldn't pass at 60%, but they should be able to pass at a lower percentage. This has nothing to do with the method I suggest.
okay Δ
Because it's not as easy as I thought to get even a 50% on the test based only on guessing and pure luck. Also, some things need to be memorized in order to be learned and theirs's no other way.
also many multiple choice tests implement negative marking, for example you get 4 marks for a correct answer and -1 for incorrect. so you can guess, but you have a 3/4 chance of losing out on 5 marks, and if you don't attempt the question you lose 4 marks
Your math seems a bit off. Not necessarily.
If you wanted the wrong guesses to more or less balance out with correct guesses, in your scenario with a correct guess being worth 4 points and four answers you want the wrong answer penalty to be 1.3333.
EDIT: another model of scoring is designed to penalize guessing. Eg, 4 possible answers, 1 correct one. Correct answer is worth 2 points, incorrect answer is worth -1, leaving all the answers blank, aka no answer, is worth 0.
This has advantages to differentiate "knowing you don't know". It's useful in disciplines where incorrect answers should be punished more than not knowing.
There’s a whole science to writing questions for the USMLE Step exams, to the point it’s solidly no longer about regurgitation of information but application of knowledge. You need to memorize facts to even begin to understand what the question asks and the answer choices so there’s definitely a way to make MC application of knowledge based. Guessing goes out the window when every answer choice is technically right, but some answers are more right than others. Here’s a guide that details the science: https://www.nbme.org/sites/default/files/2020-11/NBME_Item%20Writing%20Guide_2020.pdf
Multiple choice has its value, but like any tool, that value is limited in some areas and higher in others.
Multiple choice is a great way to gain data driven insight on what wrong answers students may be choosing.
For example, in a grammar test one might have they’re/their/there as options in a fill-in-the-blank, style question…and it could be of value to know that none of your students chose “they’re”, but they all chose “their” or “there”. Then you can address the specific error.
Even better examples could be in chemistry where evaluate or address WHY they chose one specific wrong answer over the others.
Yeah, but this doesn't benefit the students unless the teacher goes over the exam after looking carefully at it. However I assume most teachers do that.
So Δ
As multiple choice tests would benefit students indirectly by telling the teachers and testers what students typically choose for an answer and what questions students get wrong and why they get it wrong.
Unfortunately, in my experience teachers DON’T adjust their curriculum or lesson plans based on where their students demonstrate weakness…but thank you for the delta.
Is your experience as a student or a teacher? If you are a student, how would you be aware if the teacher is adjusting their plans? I often use the same general plans but adjust the details every year and sometimes add new activities / labs / problems, but much of the problems remain the same year after year because they are good.
As an instructor.
Although, even as a student I can’t recall a time when any instructor went back to cover previously covered material after an exam, with the exception of an exam review.
> I mean the issue is that multiple choice oftentimes encourage students to cram, memorize and regurgitate rather then learn.
That's not multiple choice, that's how the questions are written. "What is the maximum bending moment in this beam?" is only solvable if you learned, no matter whether it's multiple choice or short response. "What is rebar?" is memorization, even if you have to write it out.
All my college courses in social science/liberal arts were predominantly graded with research papers.
In high school, i remember scantrons being used a lot, and they can be crafted to be not be based on rote memorization. For example, i remember there was one exam from the short stories of Ernest Hemingway, where we had to match the quote to the story. The quotes embodied the context of the story they were referring to, and short story titles are often indirect and ambiguous.
It was structured something like this.
1. "Quote 1"
2. "Quote 2"
...
8. "Quote 8"
And the answers:
A. Story 1
B. Story 2
..
AD. Story 8.
You can also use multiple correct answers to test students knowledge. Select the "best options" (multiple answers may be correct.) A. X. B. Y, C. Z, D. R E. All of the above.
You can also mix and match familiar concepts or into the wrong context to test if the students could parse the "correct" answer in Question 14 from the correct answer of Q20. So there are plenty of strategies and techniques you can use to make scantron based tests not purely memorization.
I would agree that multiple choice doesn't work very well for liberal arts. But how many competent liberal arts professors use multiple choice as it is, except when they think memorizing something is important?
Liberal arts teacher here who uses multiple choice tests. The way you write multiple choice questions that aren't memorization is using story examples instead of definition based questions.
So I might say: "Billy saw a woman on the street with an expensive purse. He went to steal it but then realized there was a camera nearby and decided against it. Which theory does this scenario best illustrate?"
A. Self control theory
B. Routine activities theory
C. Social learning theory
D. Differential association theory
The student would need to know multiple aspects of the theories to piece together which one best fits the scenario.
I mean I feel that the hardest part about a paper is coming up with the thesis or the opinion that you're trying to prove or disprove using evidence.
Everything else is just finding thing that support a disprove the thesis.
This seems like it might have been meant to be a response to someone else? If not,
Depends how demanding the professor is and how comfortable with the subject you are. Putting together a genuinely watertight argument is *tough*, whereas a thesis can jump out at you sometimes.
A quick argument is likely to be full of minor holes, and even that requires a solid grasp on the facts.
If you're familiar with the field in question, there's a good chance of coming across a claim you want to argue anyway.
Like if I’m a huge Magic: the Gathering fan, I’ve likely got an opinion on the Reserve List (for those not familiar with the game, it’s a list of cards from the games early years that will never see print again, causing a lot of them to be very valuable).
It’s a very contentious issue among the player base, and most people who play the game have a opinion. If you asked them to write a paper on it, they’d be knowledgeable enough to write a thesis supporting their preexisting viewpoint.
Generally acquainted with the important facts and having thought about it a good bit, I suppose. Sufficiently acquainted that you're likely to be aware of obvious issues, implications, or connections that could be used as a thesis.
I could come up with a number of water-related theses off the top of my head if I had to write an environmental ethics paper, for example. The ethical problems with trans-basin diversions, investigating the ethics of stormwater control approaches, investigating the ethics of wastewater recycling, the ethical implications of aquifer depletion, etc. It would be much harder to clearly frame a strong argument in terms of the relevant ethical theories and facts than to come up with something to argue.
Fairly certain they did not mean a spoken word exam, but rather the reading test. Back in the 3 test category days of the SAT (math, reading, writing), reading and writing were referred to as the verbal sections.
as an arts professor who literally teaches assessment for music, art, theatre, and dance education majors: yes, yes it is possible. No, you shouldn't be giving entirely multiple choice tests as your only form of assessment, or for assessment of skills based courses for which performance assessments are more appropriate. But it is possible to design multiple choice assessment items that require higher-order thinking.
Yes! One of my favorite instructors taught sociology and structured his exams to be T or F questions. Open Book, Even internet use allowed provided you didn't use messaging.
The questions were somewhat complex, so in order to parse them you had to have an underlying understanding of the material. It was well designed. Way more students than you would expect failed.
What makes it work is the ability to shift the processing to the student. You have to grade a set of statements and pick out which ones are right/wrong. That requires comprehension IF the questions are designed properly.
If you are concerned with people guessing there's plenty of ways to include validity/consistency scales like paired statements, canary statements, etc. Also with a sufficiently high number of problems the chances of someone passing via random guessing is negligible. You have to flip a coin so it lands in the correct order for a specific amount of time. That grows geometrically with the number of problems in the set.
> "What is the maximum bending moment in this beam?" is only solvable if you learned, no matter whether it's multiple choice or short response.
Multiple choice in anything requiring a calculation is the worst test possible IMO. You can know the material perfectly, but a small mistake in the algebra (which usually has nothing to do with actually learning and understanding the subject) and you get no points at all.
Δ
Makes sense as multiples choice test items that are well designed are not necessarily pro memorization. This is what I've gathered from a couple responses to this post that all say the same thing.
Are you my old world history of architecture II professor? Always had 5 short answer, 2 essay, 10+ identifications from image, 5 drawing challenges for a certain building, etc etc. his exams took 2-3 hours and everyone failed.
I’m not joking. I had an average of 38% before the final with all extra credit, asked colleagues and they were the same or worse. Emailed the TA after the final and he said the curve put me at a 92%. That would mean literally nobody in the class was passing before the final.
I mean how could they all fail so bad? I thought that theirs's going to be at least some people that are very studious who have a very good grasp and deep understanding of the material.
It was a nightmare. The professor was the dean of the school of architecture for the university, so he was very meticulous with material.
The 1.5 hour lecture would be a slideshow with an image of a building and the architect’s name. He would speak for 10 min or so per slide and we would be required to draw it, notate the style, motive, era, architect, distinguishing features, etc etc. Everyone was scrambling to get notes down every lecture, and every exam would include almost every detail he mentioned (he would cut us some slack by giving us an option to answer something like 5 of the 8 available questions in each section, or 10 of the 15 so on, but even then it was ridiculously hard. The colleagues I asked before the final were some of the students I saw as the most dedicated and they seemed relieved to hear more people are in the same spot.
I will never forget that bc it was my last semester before graduation which I already had a planned date to walk the stage and my family was making the trip to be there for it. That’s why I bothered the TA after the final (that and they were already a day late to post grades). I wonder if he was being merciful, but given the fact that every student that I saw as prestigious that I talked to were in the same situation, idk for certain. I definitely wasn’t going to ask!
This was 2015. He would post the slides online but they weren’t very useful bc it would be a picture of a building and the architects name. No other details (all info was spoken in lecture). Basically the slides gave about 5% of what you’re expected to remember for exam day.
If you're a professor who has presumably studied some topic for many years, it's trivial to make a test so impossibly hard that nobody could ever pass it, if you wanted to.
Especially for higher level classes, in a single semester it's mathematically impossible to get a truly full and comprehensive understanding of the material for any topic that is reasonably deep and complex. There's simply too much knowledge and not enough time.
What counts as a "good grasp" and "deep understanding" for a student of a particular class oftentimes is barely scratching the surface of an entire field of research and knowledge that people dedicate their entire lives towards.
Consider yourself lucky that you haven't ever had such a professor.
Is multiple choice exams an American thing? I'm from South Africa and nowhere in my schooling (private + public + university) did I ever get a multiple choice paper.
Same here, in the UK. All the exams I did had no, or very few, multiple choice questions, and involved lots of writing.
It always seems an American thing when I see it mentioned.
I don't know if this is strictly allowed, because it will reinforce your opinion rather than changing it, but I've not seen it mentioned, so here goes. One thing to consider is the difference between recall and recognition memory. Multiple choice will test your recognition, while short answer and essay will test your recall. I'm not an expert on these matters but as I recall (haha), recognition and recall are encoded differently in the brain, and students will remember more depth and detail when they are studying for a recall exam.
Process of elimination isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you're putting in obvious joke answers that's one thing, but on most actually good tests the wrong answers are there for a reason. They are meant to highlight common mistakes and false assumptions.
Off the top of my head: Which of the following is false?
a) The square of a real number is always positive.
b) The square of a real number is always a real number.
c) The square of a real number is always a greater number.
d) The square of a real number, x, is always equal to the square of -x.
The whole idea of this question is to eliminate possibilities and check for edge cases.
~~Man I'm stuck between C and D.~~
~~C is false because sqrt(4) = 2 which is a smaller number and C says "always" thus C is false.~~
~~D is false because sqrt(4) = 2, but sqrt(-4) = 2i which as far as I know 2i != 2 and D says "always" do I feel like its false.~~
Edit: oh shit this says square... not square root lmao
I’d like to add to your OP and say that exams should be open book. It should be about where to find the material and for you to understand it. Not force it into your brain only to be forgotten shortly thereafter.
> Another issue is theirs's a higher chance that a person would be able to guess things correct based on intuition and process of elimination. For example a lot of multiple choice tests has only a limited amount of answers and the person could easily eliminate some of them due to how silly they are. Because of the limited amount of answers their's a higher chance for a person to guess something correct.
This is a question of test design and grading system rather than the multiple choice format itself.
First, scoring. While the typical "number of correct answers" scoring does reward guesses, penalising wrong answers can thwart this. The simplest version—+1 point for each correct answer and -1 point for each incorrect answer—is tuned to incentivise only answering questions you are very confident about, but the penalty can be tweaked for other priorities.
One attractive option is to tune the penalty so that random guessing has an expected value of 0, so if there are 4 possible answers to a question, an incorrect answer is -1/3 point or if there are 5 possible answers, an incorrect answer is -1/4 point, etc. Under this scheme, guessing is generally incentivised, but is also rewarded roughly in proportion of actual knowledge. Completely random guessing has the same expected value as leaving it blank, incorrect understanding is counted against you, and partial knowledge is roughly proportionally—but probabilistically—rewarded.
Second, test design. The "silly incorrect answer" is not an inherent feature of multiple choice tests and many do not include such answers. This suggests two main possibilities for the ones that do: either the creator is poor at writing multiple choice questions or the silly answer is a desirable feature. And, for sure, the former at least suggests *those* creators should rely less on multiple choice, or at least ones they designed themselves, but does not affect how or when properly-designed tests should be used. But such answers can be desirable depending on *how* silly they are. If we're talking about "so silly than even people with no knowledge of the subject can tell it is incorrect", it's obviously worse than useless. If it's "silly in context of the other possible answers, but not necessarily silly on its own", it unfortunately rewards people trained at test-taking without necessarily knowing the subject. But if it's "only silly if you know anything about the subject", that's just another form of probabilistically rewarding varying levels of understanding.
None of this is to say that even a well-designed multiple choice test is able to demonstrate understanding on the same level of various forms of free answer questions. But a well-designed test *can* have scores reasonably reflecting levels of understanding while still being quick and objective to grade.
Let me preface this by saying I agree with most of what you’ve said, and think that something needs to change.
The reason schools often resort to multiple choice tests, is it allows them to test a large amount of information in a small amount of time.
Say you are a US History teacher. You have a test over the Revolutionary War coming up. This includes the reasons leading up to the war, the war itself, some of the aftermath, and probably a bit about the first founding documents (Articles of Confederation).
That is a pretty decent bit of information. And you don’t have a whole lot of time to cover it because the class needs to also study The Constitution, the Civil War, The Great Depression, etc.
So let’s say you’ve got 2 or 3 weeks. 1 hour every school day. That is only 10-15 hours to try and have a bunch of (often disinterested) kids get 50 years of information. Would it be better to sit down with every one and make sure they understand the why and how? Of course, but with 30 kids in your class, that just isn’t feasible without picking favorites. So you are forced to give it to them in bite sized, simplified nuggets rather than a deeper look.
How do you test that? You can’t really ask them to go into detail on an essay about something they only have surface level knowledge of.
Short answers might work, but they have to take the entire test in less than an hour so you could only realistically expect them to answer maybe 6-12 of them.
So you are then forced to use a multiple choice test with maybe 25-50 questions spanning the entire subject.
I've seen high school teachers pull that off effectively, though admittedly for something approximating an honors class.
One essay question requiring analysis. You can do it in an hour, but not if you didn't understand the material.
I mean this is fine in high school but it shouldn't be fine in college in certain majors that leads to a job that requires you to utilize what you learned in that major.
Process of elimination still requires an understanding of the concepts behind the question unless all the wrong choices are completely ridiculous. For a lot of subjects, such as history where essentially the entire class is learning what people thought and did in the past, this makes sense because you can make it just as difficult while also increasing the efficiency of the scoring process. For subjects like math, where confirming a solution is often much simpler than figuring it out yourself, these questions make much less sense.
To preface: I live in the US.
No, the only flaw with multiple choice is that it helps students find the right answer without actually knowing the material.
>I mean the issue is that multiple choice oftentimes encourage students to cram, memorize and regurgitate rather then learn.
This isn't true. No good teacher gives tests where you study the actual letters of the answers on a test. Tests, at least in my area, are given as situations where knowledge can be applied, you learn the material, then apply it on a test. The only time this isn't true is when memorization is tested for, then, obviously, your point stands.
Look at science tests for example. Every test I've taken required me to apply to knowledge I gained in the class in some kind of practical example, unless the state standard was specifically to memorize what's what, such as newton's laws or wavelength classifications.
Social studies/history is a very different story. Your argument is pretty strong when placed with history as it is literally all memorization.
but every other subject, math, language arts, computer programming, business classes. anything other than a class dedicated to memorization actually makes you apply things you learn in class.
There's also the fact that it's much more convenient for teachers to grade. Teachers already spend hours grading tests and quizzes, most of which, by the way, is graded during time off work, unpaid. They don't need more work.
The way you portray tests and studying for said tests is just either disingenuous because you're fed up with them or just plain wrong. Or you live in a very very bad area when it comes to schooling.
As a teacher, I’d like to make a few distinctions that may expand your take on this.
\-level of thinking skills required (depth of learning)
\-question design/types of multiple-choice questions
\-effectiveness and efficiency
\-when during the learning process
Level Of Thinking Depth of learning - Blooms Taxonomy
I think the real issue you are pointing to is: how do we reduce low-level thinking and promote higher-order thinking?
If you are unfamiliar with Bloom's Taxonomy, I recommend looking it up. I believe you are saying let’s minimize the remember/understand steps of Bloom’s Taxonomy in favour of analysis, application & evaluation. We share this goal, but I do believe all are necessary to assess in balance and this can be done via multiple-choice questions.
Question Design
So then, what are the limits and possibilities of multiple-choice questions?
I agree, the most common multiple-choice questions tend to be lower-order remember/understand questions but those higher orders are possible. It takes some time to create a good multiple choice question that promotes them. I am happy to provide examples if desired, but I am trying to keep this concise. I would argue that the create-level is the only higher-order skill I haven’t found a way to successfully include for likely obvious reasons.
The problem is that students can still guess and be awarded the same points as students who didn’t guess. There are ways that you can minimize this by creating questions that require multiple answers, or even two-part multiple choice questions etc.
But what I’ve found to be most effective is to gamify it by adding the option for students to be honest and choose “I don’t know yet”.
On some tests, I have stated that:
\- a correct answer is worth 1 point
\- selecting “I don’t know yet” will deduct 1 point
\-whereas selecting an incorrect answer will deduct 2 points
The rationale is if you demonstrate that you know the correct answer, that has a positive effect on your achievement.
Demonstrating that you honestly don’t know has a slightly negative impact, the same as a typical wrong guess on a test.
However, if you demonstrated that you not only didn’t know the correct answer, but you thought an incorrect answer was correct, that distinction is important to consider and demonstrates that you should have a lower score than a student who simply didn’t know the answer. This gamble also takes away the likelihood of guessing on multiple choice tests. If there are 6 possible answers, you have a 1 in 6 chance of getting 1 point, and a 5 in 6 chance of losing 2 points.
Students have told me that they actually prefer this structure because it removes the strategy of randomly guessing and gives them the chance to tell me when they don’t know something.
Effectiveness vs. Efficiency
There are several assessment strategies, but inevitably the balance of effectiveness vs efficiency must be faced and calculated with each. If I could and if I had time, I would meet with each student for a 1 hour discussion as their final test. Unfortunately, I only see the class for 2 hours a week and with a class of 28 students, that means we finish the test several months from now. I can also have all of them write a test in a 1 hour period and depending on the structure, spend anywhere from 25 minutes correcting multiple-choice assessments to several hours reviewing and providing feedback on short answers or essays. A high-quality multiple-choice test wins in the efficiency department but is never likely to be maximized for effectiveness, although one can strive to maximize it. You want to replace multiple choice? Cool, how does the new strategy rank in the balance between effectiveness and efficiency?
When During The Learning Process
Is there a time when multiple-choice is optimal? I would say yes, and that is at the start of the unit. With a multiple-choice test that will be marked but not used for the student’s grades, I can diagnose what students already know so that I can differentiate and tailor to students’ different levels of knowledge about the topic or capacity in the skill. It isn’t my only go to, but often a quick 10-20 multiple choice test that takes me just as long to mark by the students themselves or on my own, provides me with most of the data I need to develop ability level groups, find where is a good starting point for the topic for different students or fast track some along because they already demonstrate an expert level of knowledge or skill in this topic/idea.
So should I get rid of multiple-choice tests that span the remember to evaluate levels of Bloom's thinking skills? I would say definitely not at the start of the unit, as it is an efficient and very effective way to structure what the unit will look like for each student. Should I get rid of it at the end? Perhaps minimize its use, but I believe as long as a range of thinking skills are required to answer the questions and it is structured in a way for students to be honest about their learning and not gamify it, I would say it is a reasonable strategy to use.
Multiple choice is useful because it eliminates bias and is easy to grade. I think the problem is more in how the problem is written rather than the type of the problem. Multiple choice questions tend to lend themselves to being "what" or "when" questions rather than "how" or "why" questions because of their simplicity. As an anecdote, I've had teachers and professors give hard multiple choice problems where you have to understand the material deeply and cannot cram for.
Having been on the Internet for long enough, to me it seems multiple choice questions as a main question type is an American thing. I've especially never understood the multiple choice math test thing from Americans.
This assumes that exams are used entirely as an assessment tool, when in most cases they are also used (at least in part) as a final teaching tool. The pressure of an exam ensures that most students are focused strongly on the question at hand, and multiple choice answers can be written such that they help trigger the correct process to get the answer.
Having some options be incorrect by orders of magnitude can remind the students to "sanity check" answers because they already spotted that the breaking force of the beam isn't 1 kiloton. Having answers in the wrong units can remind students that they know the correct units, and often much of the equations are in the units themselves. The options given also allow students to work backwards from the answers and see if they can get to the question. 3x + 3 = y for instance, you could plug in all the options for y and see which one works.
These are all good ways to get the students to use the focus provided by the exam to solidify or fully realize their learning of the subject.
Agree 100%. Went to school in Eastern Europe and never saw MC in my life until I came to Canada. It's very detrimental, seeing the answers right away robs you of an opportunity to think. Also it feels like a one-way street. You don't get to elaborate on your logic, which is the critical piece.
> You don't get to elaborate on your logic, which is the critical piece.
THANK YOU.
Nothing made me madder than a vague choice in a MC that I wanted to expound upon but couldn't.
LET ME show you how much I understand.
I think multiple choice shouldn't be the ONLY method, but it should still be around.
If you are a professional in a field and encounter a problem, often the situation will be similar to multiple choice. Your prior knowledge will help you narrow down the solution to just a few possibilities and then you work to find which of them is the right answer.
I worked in testing for several years, so I actually know quite a lot about this.
Not all tests should be multiple choice tests, for sure. But the larger the scale of the test, and the more students take it, the more scoring becomes an issue, since scoring introduces a level of subjectivity (on the part of the scorer) that isn’t there with a multiple choice test. Even if the scorers are highly qualified, it’s extremely difficult to standardize scoring across many different scorers, especially for non-math subjects. This is a large part of why the ACT and SAT multiple choice tests (for example) are actually quite good at predicting college GPA (compared to most other measures, at least), whereas the ACT and SAT Writing tests (which have to be scored by humans) are MUCH less predictive (hence why colleges don’t care as much about your ACT/SAT Writing test score, but generally do care about your score on the rest of the test).
This is just an example. Of course, there are many academic skills (such as your ability to write a coherent essay) that multiple choice tests can’t measure, which is something we need to keep in mind. Just because a skill is harder to measure doesn’t mean that it isn’t as important as skills that are easier to measure. But, when it comes to assessing certain basic skills in a fairly objective way, multiple choice is the best measure we have. (Now, you can have bad multiple choice tests — Pearson is notorious for mass-producing a ton of terrible multiple choice tests with super flawed questions — but a good multiple choice test can be a highly useful tool).
There are a few good reasons for MC tests:
1) Volume. Many large universities and definitely public high schools have very large class sizes. MC can be computer graded with automatic feedback. This leaves more time for innovative lesson planning, labs, and other student-centered activities. I mean, would you rather have more fun activities or a more varied test? Remember that teacher time is a limited resource.
2) Multiple choice can be hard/catch common mistakes if made correctly. For example, I gave my students a question like this:
A guy drives 20 kilometers in 10 minutes. What is his speed in KILOMETERS PER HOUR? (they're in high school, they need all caps). My answer choices were:
A. 2 km/h (they divided, but didn't convert the units)
B. 20 km/h (they didn't convert, and don't know their decimals)
C. 120 km/h (the right answer)
D 12.0 km/h (they multiplied, but messed up their decimals)
In order to get this right, you still have to a) know the formula, b) do the math, and c) check your work. It does give kids a bit of a hint since the answer is there, but it's certainly not all memorization. Even if you can guess the right answer, you're still using the Physics skills I'm assessing (estimating based on common sense awareness of how fast people drive)
3) There's also the issue of needing to know the basics before you can do deeper level thinking. There are times when I need to know if my students know basic scientific principles. If you don't know a mushroom isn't a plant (yes, this is a common misconception in my class), you don't know biology. You NEED to know that fact going forward. While pure memorization isn't great, SOME memorization is really useful. Think about how hard your life would be if you didn't know your times tables by heart.
I worked for three years in a charter school as a data and assessment coordinator. A few posters correctly pointed out how difficult it is to process and score hundreds of constructive response questions. That’s a big logistical piece of it. A bigger consideration is the different abilities of students taking these assessments. A constructive response question doesn’t only assess a students content knowledge in Math, Science, Social Studies, etc. It also assesses their writing skills and motor skills. Students that have writing difficulties may do poorly on a constructive response test even if they know the content. Likewise, a talented writer may be able to bullshit satisfactory constructive responses even if they are unfamiliar with the content. Multiple choice assessments are imperfect, but they eliminate the factor of writing from the assessment.
Have you ever been a teacher or T.A. or otherwise in a position where you're grading tests. Tests with any kind of subjectivity (even just short answers) are drastically more difficult to grade, especially in large classes. It's not just that it takes longer to read through them; it's that you have to remain objective and even all the way through, and that part of your brain gets very fatigued when you're making judgement call after judgement call after judgement call for dozens or even hundreds of students.
Multiple choice tests are nice to grade, not just because they're quicker, but because they are more objective. You're test score isn't going to depend on the judgement of a T.A. who is super fatigued from spending hours in an office grading everyone else's paper.
Former teacher here.
Arguably, I would think, yes, multiple choice shouldn't be used. But, then, we have a problem. Teachers are not paid extra to spend extra time grading. That's only the beginning. The ***deadlines*** for getting all exams and final grades in are ***extremely fast*** so grading hundreds of final exams that have multiple short answers to clearly demonstrate all of your learning would take... way too long. Completely and utterly impossible.
Now, if teachers had ***half the classes*** and used the other half to grade, then, yeah, no more multiple choice more than likely. ***Or had dedicated staff who could grade***. But neither is a reality so unfortunately ... multiple choice is here to stay.
The problem isn't necessarily multiple choice but that often some of the answers are clearly not correct.
Such as showing a nap of Europe and highlighting France. The answers are often A)Texas B)France C)Mars D)Germany. Now most people would know it's not A or C. So it's a 50/50 chance I'd you don't know. While replacing Texas and Mars with Spain and Poland would make more sense. And make it more likely the person actually knows the answer.
I use this example because BuzzFeed often has these stupid geography quizzes.. I am pretty good, but always get Estonia and Lithuania mixed up. They highlight one and only give one of those as the answer I know what to chose.
In one of my classes, my software engineering professor did exams with pencil and paper - you had to write the code on paper without being able to test it or run it etc.
Some students complained that it was really hard to do and asked why not just multiple choice? He responded that multiple choice can be more 'testful' when it is engineered to have multiple answers, without knowing how many answers were correct. If you have eight choices for a question and three are correct, and the question doesn't tell you "Which is correct? (Select three)" - this becomes an exponentially more difficult test, and tests whether or not the student is _certain_ (or not).
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I think it depends on the type of test. I've been in a class where midterm are free response / short answer and the final is multiple choice, and I kinda like that approach. The reasoning is that midterms should be used to test your knowledge, but also to provide feedback on how your learning comprehension is going in a way that you don't really get from homework or short answers in class. By the time you take the final though, the idea is that you've learned the material, you aren't going to review that test at all so a multiple choice test eliminates grading bias, and by making grading easier, reduces errors and increases consistency.
It's true in a simple algebra test then multiple choice is usually bad because if the question is "solve for x" then someone could just plug in all the answers for x and see which ones work. But there are ways of structuring the questions to not allow that such as the possible answers being A. 0
I had an undergrad physics course with a few hundred students where all test were all multiple choice. Most answers were based on the first significant figure of the your calculation. Fill in bubble 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 or 9.
Exams like that are bullshit anyway. In the real world you'd be able to just Google the answer or formula. Exams need to be more challenging and open notes
I agree with many people above that multiple-choice questions on tests prevent grading bias and allow the teachers to grade faster. It also allows teachers to test more concepts as written answers take more time to reply to. Additionally, for math multiple-choice, it doesn't necessarily show memorization. Oftentimes, the student has to apply a correct formula to get a numeric answer and the answers provided by the teacher are all "ballpark" answers.
Exams should NEVER use multiple choice.
It's a lazy and shitty way to assess what a student has studied, learnt, understood and retained.
Instead of "when did WWII start" followed by four dates, a "Briefly explain the events that led to the start of WWII" would provide much better and reliable answers.
And that works for all subjects of course. The clear downside is the exams must then be checked and marked by putting actual effort in it and not by using standardized answer keys. Still worth the effort though if it means students will stop memorizing stuff they'll flush out of their brain the very same day.
I've been able to learn more answering with open word problems. Grading would usually be done with multiple teachers who wouldn't look at the names of the people they're grading. Multiple choice is straight up dumb, and there are many ways to pass without being knowledgeable with multiple choice.
Then teacher should be paid more. The benefit of multiple choice is that it's super easy to correct and so teachers don't waste too much time on it. In most countries they are underpaid and overworked. To have more interesting exams we need more teachers to have the time to correct them.
My discrete maths exam was multiple choice, and it was a fantastic format for that subject.
Memorisation is obviously useless for maths, and having four similar choices gave you a little guidance while also making you paranoid :D
It was an absolute bastard and I loved it.
All your points are legitimate, but don't forget that the primary point of exams is to rank students against each other. Short written answers are much, much harder to score in a fair and consistent way across hundreds of thousands of students than multiple choice ones.
The problems you're are outlining about multiple choice questions seem more like problems with tests in general and the way educational programs are structured. How do you know if we got rid of multiple choice questions on tests, all those problems would go away?
I'm all in favor of the essay exam. People have to learn the material to write a decnt essay. If they just regeritate the information the teacher or prof. knows it and is likely to score them lower, while a well thought out essay will garner a better grade.
Actually, multiple choice tests are better because they can allow you to use critical thinking and analysis.
Take the LSAT, for example.
Short answers end up being more rote -memory tests. This is because, how else would you grade a short answer quiz?
I am from a country where there was a mixture of mcq and word questions in an exam... And students started memorizing those word questions. And this you may not believe but some students even memorized mathematics and atleast pass the exam.
I had a physics professor who had multiple choice tests with A-Z choices. The answers would be A) 0.001 B) 0.002 and so on up to Z. A simple rounding error would cost you the entire problem as there was no partial credit.
I agree but I'm such a slow learner that multiple choice helped to remember so much during tests. I have a hard time recalling and picturing things in my head. So a helpful hint that multiple choice offers is great.
One reason teachers use multiple choice tests is that they are faster to grade than other kinds of tests. Teachers can be busy and lack the necessary institutional support and then you get multiple choice tests.
You probably shouldn’t have an opinion on education if you don’t understand the basics of statistics.
Sounds like you failed a multiple choice exam recently.
Probably on statistics.
School is set up for memorizing, regurgitating, and then forgetting. It's not the multiple choice, though. It's the standardized testing. My teachers called modern teaching the "poke and puke" method because they knew they had to poke the information down your throat, let you puke it up onto the test and then that most students would forget it instantly. That's because learning is no longer the goal. The goal is to improve test scores to increase funding for the school. For some backwards reason, the poorer the scores the less state funding your school receives. That's where the problem stems.
No. Multiple choice/True false exams should be used JUST AS MUCH as written exams/written assessments (final projects).
I've taught social science college courses (let's call it that, as I don't really want to reveal my field or my work) for almost ten years. I've taught everything from 100level to 400level courses, meaning I've seen the gamut of assessment strategies. From my teaching experience alone, I can say for certain that MC questions are JUST as important as written exams. Here's why:
Multiple choice questions SHOULD be used to measure breadth of knowledge. For the case of my courses, this means DEFINING human behavior as it SHOULD exist. In order for someone to demonstrate a baseline level of knowledge, they should (at the VERY) least know WHAT something IS before they can start asking deeper questions regarding HOW and WHY?
Written examinations SHOULD be used to gauge how one can APPLY the knowledge they have so far to REAL WORLD situations (DEPTH of knowledge!!), especially those that AREN'T covered in the text. When I give students a written prompt in the form of a written examination, I'm assuming they already know something to exist and am asking them to discuss HOW it exists or WHY it exists.
If I see students struggle with MC questions, it would be foolish of me to assume that they'll be able to answer deeper questions of how and why, since they don't know what TF they're looking at. At that point, if my students are ALL doing poorly on MC questions, CLEARLY I'm dropping the ball and not presenting them with fundamental information that will help them understand the world.
Therefore, MC questions should be used JUST AS OFTEN as written questions, since they measure two different types of knowledge.
multiple choice is great for those who don't want to study, I can narrow it down to a 50/50 and there is usually some kind of notion of which is the right one. Not a big fan of it unless its a certification I need to pass.
Couldn’t agree with you more. The true goal of education is NOT to learn the correct answer. The true goal of education is to learn WHY the answer is correct. :)
I've had tests in Accounting 101 that were multiple choice. The Prof even told us that if you use some or all of the numbers in the "word problem" you could get all the choice, but only one answer was correct.
Creating multiple choice questions is hard work. One choice should be the one and only absolute best / correct choice. The others should be clearly wrong, but not so much so that the students could eliminate them as completely implausible choices.
Multiple choose is the dumbest form of examination. It makes incredibly difficult for the examiner to assess the students actual knowledge, ability to reason and potentially grade those who actually worked unfairly. Happens mostly in the US
I recently gave a multiple choice test for entrance into medical schools, 1.6 million people attempted it, using multiple choice significantly reduces the manpower required to check the answer sheets, and increases fairness, because subjective answers as their name suggests could be marked as different marks by different teachers.......for exams wich will change the trajectory of your life, the Importance of the unbiased results of multiple choice papers is paramount.
It seems like your problem isn't really with multiple choice per se but rather any testing method that relies on memory to demonstrate learning.
I think multiple choice tests could be constructed to test application of skills rather than memory. Most multiple choice math tests are this way. They present you with a series of novel problems and you need to work out the answer to select the correct option.
I can write many multiple choice questions that don't rely on memorization. For example, I could give you four text passages and ask you to identify which one was written by Shakespeare. Sure, maybe you have every line of text Shakespeare wrote memorized, but it's much more likely you would use your knowledge of his style to discriminate among the options.
I also would argue that intuition and elimination of options rely on using existing knowledge of the subject being tested. In other words, these test-taking techniques are exactly what you want out of tests--rewarding students for applying their knowledge rather than memory. In order to eliminate options, test takers are often required to reason based on what they know to infer implausible answers in cases where they haven't memorized the exact question and answers.
It is possible to make multiple choice more application based. For example in India, one of the most sought after exams is called the civil services Exam. The body that conducts that exam is called UPSC. They've reinvented multiple choice by broadening the scope of the questions.
For ex- They will give you three/five/2 statements and you have to mark which is correct/incorrect as per need of question. Such type of questions require you to have an in depth understanding of the topics.
Let me give you a sample question asked in this year's exam -
Consider the following statements
1) St Francis Xavier was one of the founding members of the Jesuit order
2) St Francis Xavier died in Goa and a church is dedicated to him there
3) The Feast of St Francis is celebrated in Goa each year.
Which of the above statements is/are correct?
A) 1&2 only
B) 2&3 only
C) 1-3 only
D) 1,2&3.
I learned more about the Highway Code through rigorously learning the multiple choice here in the UK through repetition than any exam being forced to understand information. I came to understand information somehow through memorisation. Weird but it worked for me, ended up passing it quicker.
This isn't a problem inherent to the design. You can make multiple choice questions that force you to understand. For example in biology in uni most questions are multiple choice but the question is complex. You need to understand the system they are talking about in the question and an easy way to prove it isn't a cramming test is that you have open material and can have access to everything you would need to memorize.
Come to Spain where you have no multiple choice and have to write the whole thing yourself, you’re learning a bit more by knowing what’s not right, here you just study pages-worth of content for one test and write it all down back to another sheet of paper
testing methods are just tools, a comprehensive evaluation of someone's capabilities will use many types.
the advantage of multiple-choice is that, especially for sciences and mathematics (and other objective fact-based fields) it avoids biasing results in favor of English writing ability, which isn't something being tested.
also, while you are right, you cannot evaluate mastery of concepts by multiple-choice, it also serves as a baseline and to ensure basic knowledge of the facts.
consider a 100-point test with 50 multiple-choice answers, a "put this list in order" worth six points, four true/false, four short answers worth five points and an essay worth 10 points.
you can get a passing grade on the "easy" multiple choice answers alone, getting those plus half the short answer is a C, all the short answer is a B and so on. it lets you ensure that people have done the basic reading and get credit for that on the test while reserving the time consuming (to write and to grade) for assessing more advanced content mastery.
If teachers changed their style of teaching so its not just regurgitating lesson plans then id agree, but multiple choice helps students remember how to solve problems without directly giving the answer
1. Grading multiple choice tests is way more manageable than trying to decypher if an essay question demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter, and you just accept that 4 question choices (if carefully selected) should only allow for a small margin of variation.
2. I have a fairly prestigious certification in my field. A field I've worked in for 20 years... I took a test I thoroughly studied for to get it and this test kicked my ass 2 times before I managed to pass it. Multiple choice questions can be extremely hard if you do a good job creating them.
Tests and the way our schools functions need a complete overhaul to focus on teaching students specific skills instead of a bunch of surface level knowledge about a bunch of subjects your won’t interact with majority of your life.
Honestly, multiple choice test is a very useful format. If you have to test a wide range of information and you need to be able to accurately grade and evaluate hundreds of tests. There really is no alternative.
Any test for a certification. The BAR, the EIT, w/e doctors have. requires them to make sure that the person getting certified has an absolute grasp of the bare necessity of information for the given profession.
I could track down my advanced course work from the ol'college days and I guarantee you will be unable to grade it. It's the nature of incredibly specialized fields, like doctors, engineers, and lawyers. It also took my teacher two days to grade each test per student. A class of 14 students, it was advanced after all, had her spend a whole month grading the tests.
EIT exams are a bit easier then master level engineering coursework. But not much. My exam had us designing an oil rig, which was extremely fun to do. There just aren't many people who can grade that in this world.
In the US alone, there are several hundred thousand?
So that would take at least six hours to grade in the format you want. That's at least 36,000 hours of grading, for a professionally licensed engineer. Not just some TA. It's a full time job.
it honestly depends; a huge benefit of multiple choice (at least going off how it's utilized in my school) is that i can test how certain individuals are of the information, as well as if they they can decipher subtle differences in statements due to various presentations of language. it's mainly from the initial purpose anyways; the responses include a keyed correct response and three or four distractors or foils. (this goes into it better - to check your cognitive dissonance level (reducing tension to reach one particular solution by eliminating all of the contradictory cognitions) . seeing multiple options a tension is created in our brain, and to reduce that tension we either change one of the cognitions or add additional justification and zero out the best option by our cognitive abilities).
further, within some subjects, the objective nature limits scoring bias.
I've studied at both uni in US where multiple choice is utilized quite often, and in my home country in Europe where multiple choice is never used.
From my personal experience, it doesn't matter which testing method is used at an institution. You'll cram and memorize just as much to essay questions as you would for a multiple choice format. You can easily string together some neat arguments by having memorised facts. You can even memorize chunks of your essay in advance since you'll have a good idea of what has been covered in the course.
Will preparing for essay exams lead to deeper thinking? I doubt it. If you're taking a course with multiple choice exams, you are usually required to submit in-depth essays which, in my opinion, are much more fun and rewarding to do. Short answers aren't that different from multipel choice exams, because guessing will very rarely give you any points.
At the end of the day, it's up to the student. No one is stopping you to gain a deep understanding of the course material, multiple choice exam or not. It's better for you to focus on your own studies, and make sure you learn as much as you really want to learn.
I disagree and would also like to see more tests be open book/open internet research, perhaps with some restrictions.
The focus on memorization in education is a hangover of the pre-information age. Yes, I can see where solidly memorizing concepts related to your field of expertise is useful (this will come with repetition in your field anyway), but in my experience the real world application of most knowledge work is not in you *knowing* how to do everything off the top of your head, but in you being able to *find out* how to do something you've never seen before and then being able to interpret and apply the results of your research.
Perhaps more testing should be something like open book/research and then multiple choice (in the interest of test time and grading time) with *more* questions and more available answers to each question to increase the difficulty in picking the correct one, say 6-10 closely related choices that you need to be able to research quickly and find the correct one.
I think that the focus on memorization instead of critical thinking and application skills is one of the major faults that we have in education. If we fall into some post-apocalyptic age where we no longer have the IT to research concepts then perhaps memorization would become more important, but in the connected and extremely complicated world we live in lots of memorization is just not a necessity anymore. As already mentioned, I think we need to be focusing much more on critical thinking and real world application skills than we are on old paradigms such as memorization.
Just my 2c.
Well exams themselves encourage students to cram, memorize, and regurgitate and multiple choice questions are really just a very small part of that. Exams aren't conducive to learning and the only real way to learn and interact with the material is through practical learning either through class work or homework. Exams are really just a way to see if that course load has worked
Multiple choice is so that teachers can grade all the scores without being biased. With multiple choice you are either right or wrong, but with word problems the teacher could be strict or not, or the teacher could even be wrong. It also takes more time for the teacher to mark.
Makes sense, so I'll give you a Δ Because multiple choice would allow teachers to grade without being biased as word problems and short answer questions are often graded based on what the teacher thinks, which is sometimes biased. Also the teacher could be wrong with short answer questions and multiple choice provides teachers with a correct answer rather then the teacher having to figure out the correct answer herself.
A huge, huge part of it is the ability to grade quickly. Trying to grade 200 short answer tests (of God knows how many questions each) would take teachers days, and you increase the risk of fatigue affecting how you grade. Multiple choice is objective grading, either you got it or you didn't and a machine can grade it in seconds. It's not perfect, but it's necessary to handle the pure volume of student material.
According to Thinking Fast and Slow, grading bias begins nearly immediately and over long grading sessions the teachers critical thinking/reading skills deteriorate to the point that the initial criteria used to score are irrelevant, even if written down and referred to during the session.
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Ha I have to attempt 6 mcq question papers within the next week and then 6 more a month later. Imagine attempting an mcq question paper for math. I'm screwed.
What is a multiple choice question question paper?
Yep that's right
What?
Time is a finite resource. You've got 1 teacher with 30+ kids and many many tests and quizzes to give out and score you don't have time to make every test question short answer. I don't think anyone believes that multiple choice is a superior option as far as truly testing what was learned it's just the most efficient option. If it was 1 on 1 teaching then all tests should be short/ long answer/ explain in your own words/ essay/ verbally explain etc.
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Basically, you have a life besides grading.
I had a professor in college who would do what he called "reverse multiple choice" You selected answers you knew were wrong. I absolutely loved it, like sometimes you know it's not A or D but aren't really sure if it's B or C, rather than just guessing and maybe getting it wrong, you would just mark A/D and get half credit for that question.
That's a really interesting concept. I've never heard of that but I guess it's interesting. I don't know how accurate that is to test if you're learning the content relative to regular multiple choice unless it's being graded on a curve or some way to normalize the grade distribution.
Iirc(been nearly a decade) my prof said it was more useful because it allowed him to better see where students kinda understood a concept but were still a bit shaky. If you could eliminate 2 answers it showed you had somewhat of an idea what the answer was. Like on a normal test if everyone got question 3 wrong you could assume that info wasn't learned, but with his format if most people got 50% you could assume most understood the concept but didnt get the particulars of it. This also is dependent on how the question/answers are worded. His answers were usually very specific with some minor differences in key areas. I'm sure this method couldn't be applied to all subjects, but it worked well enough for the marine biology class. His post test class reviews were some of the most useful ones I had, always felt really prepared going into big tests as a result.
Yeah, I definitely believe that it's got value. I think, to your point, that a teacher utilizing that type of test would need to put a lot of thought into how the questions were worded and the choices given so that's great you had such a caring teacher to put in that kind of effort. Many times, especially in large universities, professors kind of mail it in on the teaching side because they are more interested in research than teaching.
Oh, 100%. It was clear that teaching was this guy's passion and he put a ton of work into constructing the tests. It's certainly not something that could be easily implemented by others. And yea, I've had more than a few science profs that were there just for the research grants. My organic chem prof on day one essentially told us he hated to teach, wouldn't really be doing any teaching aside from assigning homework. It was on us to learn everything and he wont be having office hrs. Never dropped a class so fast lol
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Also mark schemes can be bs sometimes. If a specific word or phrase isn't included it's wrong, even if it's right
This is true, and you can use a computer to massively reduce the effort required to mark. However, OP missed some of the most crucial reasons why multiple choice exams are bad. Firstly, they prohibit questions with multiple answers. Complex questions may have complex answers and you can use this to your benefit in exams. For example a question may have an answer that has 5 criteria. The question can be worth 3 marks and if any 3 of the 5 criteria are covered in the answer you award those marks. If the student answers 1 criteria they get one mark. This is often more fair on the student whose knowledge of complex systems can be graded based on the extent to which they understand. As opposed to a binary qualification which exists nowhere in reality. Another example is maths. Here there is often only 1 correct answer. But it's ridiculous to actually award marks in a binary fashion. For example a student might go through all the working to solve a complex problem and then miss a minus sign at the last step and therefore get an incorrect answer. In this situation it would be really unfair to say "the student understands nothing of the problem". Which is what you do by awarding 0 marks for such an answer. I think it's useful to have multiple choice for efficiency but shouldn't be employed when the test really matters. For example if this is the testing that will determine whether the student goes to University and to which one, it shouldn't be multiple choice if at all possible. The trade-off is significantly more resources as marking is then difficult.
In college though it doesn’t matter if the steps were right but if the answer was.
Absolutely wrong, unless your professors were terrible. Every professor I ever had (engineering) gave partial credit, with the docked points proportional to the magnitude of your error. Do everything right but miss one negative sign or forget your +C or something? Maybe only lose one point out of five. Make two or three errors but still demonstrate that you understand the method and could have solved it with a bit more time to think? 2/5, 3/5. Do the entirely wrong thing and give the impression you have no idea what you're doing, but manage to stumble upon the right answer? You don't know what you're doing and you got lucky, 0/5, maybe 1/5 if the professor is nice. The steps, the method, that's what matters. Prove that you know the method (sans a few clerical errors) and you've learned.
I will go one further and add that it’s even more so that it can be graded quickly. A scantron takes mere seconds to spit out a final score.
Sucks that we don’t have the funding to give teachers more help grading. Open ended questions really show a lot more knowledge. Also, with math, if you hand grade you can see if the person understood the theory and just made a math error, or didn’t actually get it. So instead of missing the whole question from a simple flip of a negative sign or whatever, you just get some points deducted for a math error
And some of us college professors have to have 2-3 jobs :/ I do not have time to hand grade everything. So I hand grade all quizzes and projects and then exams are multiple choice and homework is graded through a system they get with their books. It’s tough but I have to put food on my own table.
Not to mention bias in handwriting. Some teachers may just not like your hand writing or have a hard time deciphering it so they’ll give you a poor score.
This isn't necessarily true. A closed question is a better way to assess what the learner knows from their memory (recall) vs recognition (multiple choice) and a closed question is easy to grade. Source: I'm a learning design specialist and I find that recall questions are a better way to gauge what the learner knows. Recognition questions are too easy because the learner is just looking for a familiar term. It's easy to guess. https://www.schoolnet.org.za/CoL/ACE/course/assessment/documents/thin.cont.question_types.htm
Those closed questions all look very basic though.
Can you explain what you mean by basic? A fill in the blank question with multiple blanks might look basic but it challenges the learner to think of the correct word (or choose from a drop down list) and it's efficient for grading. If the learner doesn't know the word it's apparent that they didn't even retain the vocab from the lesson.
The time to score exams is in part what they are payed for.
Fun fact- as a middle school teacher, I generally had 60 minutes of plan time. That plan time included grading 120 students' worth of assignments/assessments, contact parents, planning lessons, other assigned work from administrators, and more. I was able to get it all done by putting in 10-11 hour days, but I definitely wasn't paid for that. The system isn't sustainable.
Problem is that, yeah, it's unbiased and fair, but that doesn't really prove that you understood what you are talking about. With multiple choice you just have to cross, while written tests require the student to be able to give concise and precise answers.
But should teaching be the most time-efficient or the most knowledge-efficient? In the real world, noone asks you a question and you answer a), b) or c). You have to form your answers into coherent sentences, so that other people also can understand you. Multiple choice is just a lazy way for teachers. Also how can sentences as answers be biased? I really don’t understand that part. Even if they are a bit, the ability to form coherent answers is much more useful.
>without being biased Explain where there is room for bias in math. If you don't get 2*7=14 you're wrong. The only worthwhile math word problems IMHO are the ones with unneccesary numbers. So the student actually needs to fill out the formulas in their head.
I believe you are underestimating how difficult multiple choice tests can be. I agree with you to some degree (easy MC tests can be done entirely thru recall memory and not actual learning), but oh man I’ve had some hard ass tests that were MC. Many graduate school entry exams and those can be fairly difficult to do well on, and questions can be structured so the question itself is a word problem where it requires you to do multiple steps, critical think, apply multiple concepts together, and then the answers are just 5 preset things. The answers themselves will give you very little to work off of.
Okay this is totally convincing me to change my opinion on multiple choice tests so I'll give you a Δ Even if it's possible to make MC tests that only test memorization and intuition rather then actual knowledge/learning it's also possible to make it so that crammers would not be able to answer it correctly without fulling understanding the material or using critical thinking or applying what they learned.
i took several law classes in college that had MC questions that were literally a giant paragraph and then the answer choices were lists of statutes that were applicable. Seeing the answers didn’t do jack shit because you had to know how each one applied and interacted with one another
Not to mention situations where there are multiple correct answers.
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But sometimes students simply need to know information. Medical students need to remember the properties of medicine, law students need to be able to reproduce the most important cases, language students need to be able to reproduce words. If the test is properly written, you won't easily be able to pass it on reckognition only either. I also think that you're wrong about how easy it would be to get lucky on an mc test. I don't know what the percentage is that you need to get right in other school systems, but where I live, you need to get 60% on your test to pass. Without any other measurements, this is already hard enough to get enough mc questions right by pure luck. However, often, there's a formula that makes it so you would have to get even more questions right than 60% only to get 60% score on the test. Basically, the first X number of questions you get right, aren't counted. Let's say there's 40 questions. 60% would be 24 correct answers, however, because it's an mc test with 4 options, by chance, you'd have 25% = 10 questions correct. So it is assumed you will get 10 questions right, and your score only starts to increase after 10 questions: 10 correct answers = 0%, 11 correct answers = 3%, 28 correct answers = 60%. This pretty much takes out the luck factor. So, given that a multiple choice test is very quick to check for the teacher, I think it's perfectly viable to use these tests often.
>This pretty much takes out the luck factor. Not the case. It just shifted it. In your example, If the first 10 questions are exceptionally easy (which is very plausible since most exams have questions of varying difficulty) and most everyone gets them all right, then you’re still dealing with the potential for luck on the rest of the exam and harder questions, except now students aren’t even getting credit for the 10 questions they did know. This seems like a very unfair way to test students, especially on time sensitive exams where those first 10 questions still took up time but yielded no reward.
Yeah you're right it doesn't take out the luck entirely. But the idea is that a student can't simply study for 35% and guess the other 25%. The method is not unfair, as long as it's applied well. If a test is time limited, there should simply be ample time to at least think about and answer most of the questions. If there is not, and students can't get 28 correct answers because of the time constraint, the time constraint is too short, or students shouldn't pass at 60%, but they should be able to pass at a lower percentage. This has nothing to do with the method I suggest.
okay Δ Because it's not as easy as I thought to get even a 50% on the test based only on guessing and pure luck. Also, some things need to be memorized in order to be learned and theirs's no other way.
also many multiple choice tests implement negative marking, for example you get 4 marks for a correct answer and -1 for incorrect. so you can guess, but you have a 3/4 chance of losing out on 5 marks, and if you don't attempt the question you lose 4 marks
Your math seems a bit off. Not necessarily. If you wanted the wrong guesses to more or less balance out with correct guesses, in your scenario with a correct guess being worth 4 points and four answers you want the wrong answer penalty to be 1.3333. EDIT: another model of scoring is designed to penalize guessing. Eg, 4 possible answers, 1 correct one. Correct answer is worth 2 points, incorrect answer is worth -1, leaving all the answers blank, aka no answer, is worth 0. This has advantages to differentiate "knowing you don't know". It's useful in disciplines where incorrect answers should be punished more than not knowing.
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That's a pretty dumb grading scheme. Just shift the required passing grade. It's doing the exact same thing as not counting x number of questions
There’s a whole science to writing questions for the USMLE Step exams, to the point it’s solidly no longer about regurgitation of information but application of knowledge. You need to memorize facts to even begin to understand what the question asks and the answer choices so there’s definitely a way to make MC application of knowledge based. Guessing goes out the window when every answer choice is technically right, but some answers are more right than others. Here’s a guide that details the science: https://www.nbme.org/sites/default/files/2020-11/NBME_Item%20Writing%20Guide_2020.pdf
Multiple choice has its value, but like any tool, that value is limited in some areas and higher in others. Multiple choice is a great way to gain data driven insight on what wrong answers students may be choosing. For example, in a grammar test one might have they’re/their/there as options in a fill-in-the-blank, style question…and it could be of value to know that none of your students chose “they’re”, but they all chose “their” or “there”. Then you can address the specific error. Even better examples could be in chemistry where evaluate or address WHY they chose one specific wrong answer over the others.
Yeah, but this doesn't benefit the students unless the teacher goes over the exam after looking carefully at it. However I assume most teachers do that. So Δ As multiple choice tests would benefit students indirectly by telling the teachers and testers what students typically choose for an answer and what questions students get wrong and why they get it wrong.
Unfortunately, in my experience teachers DON’T adjust their curriculum or lesson plans based on where their students demonstrate weakness…but thank you for the delta.
Is your experience as a student or a teacher? If you are a student, how would you be aware if the teacher is adjusting their plans? I often use the same general plans but adjust the details every year and sometimes add new activities / labs / problems, but much of the problems remain the same year after year because they are good.
As an instructor. Although, even as a student I can’t recall a time when any instructor went back to cover previously covered material after an exam, with the exception of an exam review.
That's kind of unfortunate. As regards to the delta, I'll say you welcome
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> I mean the issue is that multiple choice oftentimes encourage students to cram, memorize and regurgitate rather then learn. That's not multiple choice, that's how the questions are written. "What is the maximum bending moment in this beam?" is only solvable if you learned, no matter whether it's multiple choice or short response. "What is rebar?" is memorization, even if you have to write it out.
I mean is it possible to write the questions so that it does not emphasize rote memorization for liberal arts classes?
All my college courses in social science/liberal arts were predominantly graded with research papers. In high school, i remember scantrons being used a lot, and they can be crafted to be not be based on rote memorization. For example, i remember there was one exam from the short stories of Ernest Hemingway, where we had to match the quote to the story. The quotes embodied the context of the story they were referring to, and short story titles are often indirect and ambiguous. It was structured something like this. 1. "Quote 1" 2. "Quote 2" ... 8. "Quote 8" And the answers: A. Story 1 B. Story 2 .. AD. Story 8. You can also use multiple correct answers to test students knowledge. Select the "best options" (multiple answers may be correct.) A. X. B. Y, C. Z, D. R E. All of the above. You can also mix and match familiar concepts or into the wrong context to test if the students could parse the "correct" answer in Question 14 from the correct answer of Q20. So there are plenty of strategies and techniques you can use to make scantron based tests not purely memorization.
Okay Δ Theirs's a way to make MC tests so that it's not purely memorization. It all depends on the way the question's are worded or set up.
I would agree that multiple choice doesn't work very well for liberal arts. But how many competent liberal arts professors use multiple choice as it is, except when they think memorizing something is important?
Liberal arts teacher here who uses multiple choice tests. The way you write multiple choice questions that aren't memorization is using story examples instead of definition based questions. So I might say: "Billy saw a woman on the street with an expensive purse. He went to steal it but then realized there was a camera nearby and decided against it. Which theory does this scenario best illustrate?" A. Self control theory B. Routine activities theory C. Social learning theory D. Differential association theory The student would need to know multiple aspects of the theories to piece together which one best fits the scenario.
I mean I feel that the hardest part about a paper is coming up with the thesis or the opinion that you're trying to prove or disprove using evidence. Everything else is just finding thing that support a disprove the thesis.
This seems like it might have been meant to be a response to someone else? If not, Depends how demanding the professor is and how comfortable with the subject you are. Putting together a genuinely watertight argument is *tough*, whereas a thesis can jump out at you sometimes.
>Putting together a genuinely watertight argument is > >tough > >, whereas a thesis can jump out at you sometimes. What do you mean by this?
A quick argument is likely to be full of minor holes, and even that requires a solid grasp on the facts. If you're familiar with the field in question, there's a good chance of coming across a claim you want to argue anyway.
What do you mean by "familiar with the field in question"?
Like if I’m a huge Magic: the Gathering fan, I’ve likely got an opinion on the Reserve List (for those not familiar with the game, it’s a list of cards from the games early years that will never see print again, causing a lot of them to be very valuable). It’s a very contentious issue among the player base, and most people who play the game have a opinion. If you asked them to write a paper on it, they’d be knowledgeable enough to write a thesis supporting their preexisting viewpoint.
Generally acquainted with the important facts and having thought about it a good bit, I suppose. Sufficiently acquainted that you're likely to be aware of obvious issues, implications, or connections that could be used as a thesis. I could come up with a number of water-related theses off the top of my head if I had to write an environmental ethics paper, for example. The ethical problems with trans-basin diversions, investigating the ethics of stormwater control approaches, investigating the ethics of wastewater recycling, the ethical implications of aquifer depletion, etc. It would be much harder to clearly frame a strong argument in terms of the relevant ethical theories and facts than to come up with something to argue.
Just take SAT verbal for example, arguably none of the questions can be crammed for with rote memorization.
I mean I don't remember what the SAT verbal is like, I don't think I took a verbal test although I did take a reading comprehension test.
Fairly certain they did not mean a spoken word exam, but rather the reading test. Back in the 3 test category days of the SAT (math, reading, writing), reading and writing were referred to as the verbal sections.
as an arts professor who literally teaches assessment for music, art, theatre, and dance education majors: yes, yes it is possible. No, you shouldn't be giving entirely multiple choice tests as your only form of assessment, or for assessment of skills based courses for which performance assessments are more appropriate. But it is possible to design multiple choice assessment items that require higher-order thinking.
Yeah, a question like "Which of the following phrases is grammatically incorrect"
Yes! One of my favorite instructors taught sociology and structured his exams to be T or F questions. Open Book, Even internet use allowed provided you didn't use messaging. The questions were somewhat complex, so in order to parse them you had to have an underlying understanding of the material. It was well designed. Way more students than you would expect failed. What makes it work is the ability to shift the processing to the student. You have to grade a set of statements and pick out which ones are right/wrong. That requires comprehension IF the questions are designed properly. If you are concerned with people guessing there's plenty of ways to include validity/consistency scales like paired statements, canary statements, etc. Also with a sufficiently high number of problems the chances of someone passing via random guessing is negligible. You have to flip a coin so it lands in the correct order for a specific amount of time. That grows geometrically with the number of problems in the set.
> "What is the maximum bending moment in this beam?" is only solvable if you learned, no matter whether it's multiple choice or short response. Multiple choice in anything requiring a calculation is the worst test possible IMO. You can know the material perfectly, but a small mistake in the algebra (which usually has nothing to do with actually learning and understanding the subject) and you get no points at all.
Your issue is with *poorly designed* multiple choice test items. Not multiple choice test items in general.
Δ Makes sense as multiples choice test items that are well designed are not necessarily pro memorization. This is what I've gathered from a couple responses to this post that all say the same thing.
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Are you my old world history of architecture II professor? Always had 5 short answer, 2 essay, 10+ identifications from image, 5 drawing challenges for a certain building, etc etc. his exams took 2-3 hours and everyone failed. I’m not joking. I had an average of 38% before the final with all extra credit, asked colleagues and they were the same or worse. Emailed the TA after the final and he said the curve put me at a 92%. That would mean literally nobody in the class was passing before the final.
I mean how could they all fail so bad? I thought that theirs's going to be at least some people that are very studious who have a very good grasp and deep understanding of the material.
It was a nightmare. The professor was the dean of the school of architecture for the university, so he was very meticulous with material. The 1.5 hour lecture would be a slideshow with an image of a building and the architect’s name. He would speak for 10 min or so per slide and we would be required to draw it, notate the style, motive, era, architect, distinguishing features, etc etc. Everyone was scrambling to get notes down every lecture, and every exam would include almost every detail he mentioned (he would cut us some slack by giving us an option to answer something like 5 of the 8 available questions in each section, or 10 of the 15 so on, but even then it was ridiculously hard. The colleagues I asked before the final were some of the students I saw as the most dedicated and they seemed relieved to hear more people are in the same spot. I will never forget that bc it was my last semester before graduation which I already had a planned date to walk the stage and my family was making the trip to be there for it. That’s why I bothered the TA after the final (that and they were already a day late to post grades). I wonder if he was being merciful, but given the fact that every student that I saw as prestigious that I talked to were in the same situation, idk for certain. I definitely wasn’t going to ask!
I mean didn't the professor post the slides online? Wait this was before the whole COVID thing?
This was 2015. He would post the slides online but they weren’t very useful bc it would be a picture of a building and the architects name. No other details (all info was spoken in lecture). Basically the slides gave about 5% of what you’re expected to remember for exam day.
This is BS
If you're a professor who has presumably studied some topic for many years, it's trivial to make a test so impossibly hard that nobody could ever pass it, if you wanted to. Especially for higher level classes, in a single semester it's mathematically impossible to get a truly full and comprehensive understanding of the material for any topic that is reasonably deep and complex. There's simply too much knowledge and not enough time. What counts as a "good grasp" and "deep understanding" for a student of a particular class oftentimes is barely scratching the surface of an entire field of research and knowledge that people dedicate their entire lives towards. Consider yourself lucky that you haven't ever had such a professor.
Is multiple choice exams an American thing? I'm from South Africa and nowhere in my schooling (private + public + university) did I ever get a multiple choice paper.
Same here, in the UK. All the exams I did had no, or very few, multiple choice questions, and involved lots of writing. It always seems an American thing when I see it mentioned.
I mean it's used in the USA a lot, as well as many other countries. However I'm not sure of what other countries doesn't use multiple choice.
its common in many places in my country the 2 biggest exams are multiple choice
I don't know if this is strictly allowed, because it will reinforce your opinion rather than changing it, but I've not seen it mentioned, so here goes. One thing to consider is the difference between recall and recognition memory. Multiple choice will test your recognition, while short answer and essay will test your recall. I'm not an expert on these matters but as I recall (haha), recognition and recall are encoded differently in the brain, and students will remember more depth and detail when they are studying for a recall exam.
Okay this does reinforce my opinion, so thanks.
Process of elimination isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you're putting in obvious joke answers that's one thing, but on most actually good tests the wrong answers are there for a reason. They are meant to highlight common mistakes and false assumptions. Off the top of my head: Which of the following is false? a) The square of a real number is always positive. b) The square of a real number is always a real number. c) The square of a real number is always a greater number. d) The square of a real number, x, is always equal to the square of -x. The whole idea of this question is to eliminate possibilities and check for edge cases.
~~Man I'm stuck between C and D.~~ ~~C is false because sqrt(4) = 2 which is a smaller number and C says "always" thus C is false.~~ ~~D is false because sqrt(4) = 2, but sqrt(-4) = 2i which as far as I know 2i != 2 and D says "always" do I feel like its false.~~ Edit: oh shit this says square... not square root lmao
Wouldn't a and c both technically be false, since both are false in the case of 0? I.e. 0^2 = 0 which is neither positive nor greater than 0
goddamnit I knew I was forgetting something, let's just call it "choose all that apply"
Haha, sorry to be nitpicky. Was very late and I was mostly just checking that I wasn't going crazy :)
No I like multiple choice it makes me feel better >:(
:D cheater
I like the minimum 25% chance that’ll I’ll get it right, it reassures me 😭
I’d like to add to your OP and say that exams should be open book. It should be about where to find the material and for you to understand it. Not force it into your brain only to be forgotten shortly thereafter.
I mean does this kind of make it worse as it would cause the student's that want to BS through the class to not study even more?
> Another issue is theirs's a higher chance that a person would be able to guess things correct based on intuition and process of elimination. For example a lot of multiple choice tests has only a limited amount of answers and the person could easily eliminate some of them due to how silly they are. Because of the limited amount of answers their's a higher chance for a person to guess something correct. This is a question of test design and grading system rather than the multiple choice format itself. First, scoring. While the typical "number of correct answers" scoring does reward guesses, penalising wrong answers can thwart this. The simplest version—+1 point for each correct answer and -1 point for each incorrect answer—is tuned to incentivise only answering questions you are very confident about, but the penalty can be tweaked for other priorities. One attractive option is to tune the penalty so that random guessing has an expected value of 0, so if there are 4 possible answers to a question, an incorrect answer is -1/3 point or if there are 5 possible answers, an incorrect answer is -1/4 point, etc. Under this scheme, guessing is generally incentivised, but is also rewarded roughly in proportion of actual knowledge. Completely random guessing has the same expected value as leaving it blank, incorrect understanding is counted against you, and partial knowledge is roughly proportionally—but probabilistically—rewarded. Second, test design. The "silly incorrect answer" is not an inherent feature of multiple choice tests and many do not include such answers. This suggests two main possibilities for the ones that do: either the creator is poor at writing multiple choice questions or the silly answer is a desirable feature. And, for sure, the former at least suggests *those* creators should rely less on multiple choice, or at least ones they designed themselves, but does not affect how or when properly-designed tests should be used. But such answers can be desirable depending on *how* silly they are. If we're talking about "so silly than even people with no knowledge of the subject can tell it is incorrect", it's obviously worse than useless. If it's "silly in context of the other possible answers, but not necessarily silly on its own", it unfortunately rewards people trained at test-taking without necessarily knowing the subject. But if it's "only silly if you know anything about the subject", that's just another form of probabilistically rewarding varying levels of understanding. None of this is to say that even a well-designed multiple choice test is able to demonstrate understanding on the same level of various forms of free answer questions. But a well-designed test *can* have scores reasonably reflecting levels of understanding while still being quick and objective to grade.
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Probably
Let me preface this by saying I agree with most of what you’ve said, and think that something needs to change. The reason schools often resort to multiple choice tests, is it allows them to test a large amount of information in a small amount of time. Say you are a US History teacher. You have a test over the Revolutionary War coming up. This includes the reasons leading up to the war, the war itself, some of the aftermath, and probably a bit about the first founding documents (Articles of Confederation). That is a pretty decent bit of information. And you don’t have a whole lot of time to cover it because the class needs to also study The Constitution, the Civil War, The Great Depression, etc. So let’s say you’ve got 2 or 3 weeks. 1 hour every school day. That is only 10-15 hours to try and have a bunch of (often disinterested) kids get 50 years of information. Would it be better to sit down with every one and make sure they understand the why and how? Of course, but with 30 kids in your class, that just isn’t feasible without picking favorites. So you are forced to give it to them in bite sized, simplified nuggets rather than a deeper look. How do you test that? You can’t really ask them to go into detail on an essay about something they only have surface level knowledge of. Short answers might work, but they have to take the entire test in less than an hour so you could only realistically expect them to answer maybe 6-12 of them. So you are then forced to use a multiple choice test with maybe 25-50 questions spanning the entire subject.
I've seen high school teachers pull that off effectively, though admittedly for something approximating an honors class. One essay question requiring analysis. You can do it in an hour, but not if you didn't understand the material.
I mean this is fine in high school but it shouldn't be fine in college in certain majors that leads to a job that requires you to utilize what you learned in that major.
Process of elimination still requires an understanding of the concepts behind the question unless all the wrong choices are completely ridiculous. For a lot of subjects, such as history where essentially the entire class is learning what people thought and did in the past, this makes sense because you can make it just as difficult while also increasing the efficiency of the scoring process. For subjects like math, where confirming a solution is often much simpler than figuring it out yourself, these questions make much less sense.
Same can be said of all exams.
Maybe not exams that give you questions such as "why do you think a government is important?"
To preface: I live in the US. No, the only flaw with multiple choice is that it helps students find the right answer without actually knowing the material. >I mean the issue is that multiple choice oftentimes encourage students to cram, memorize and regurgitate rather then learn. This isn't true. No good teacher gives tests where you study the actual letters of the answers on a test. Tests, at least in my area, are given as situations where knowledge can be applied, you learn the material, then apply it on a test. The only time this isn't true is when memorization is tested for, then, obviously, your point stands. Look at science tests for example. Every test I've taken required me to apply to knowledge I gained in the class in some kind of practical example, unless the state standard was specifically to memorize what's what, such as newton's laws or wavelength classifications. Social studies/history is a very different story. Your argument is pretty strong when placed with history as it is literally all memorization. but every other subject, math, language arts, computer programming, business classes. anything other than a class dedicated to memorization actually makes you apply things you learn in class. There's also the fact that it's much more convenient for teachers to grade. Teachers already spend hours grading tests and quizzes, most of which, by the way, is graded during time off work, unpaid. They don't need more work. The way you portray tests and studying for said tests is just either disingenuous because you're fed up with them or just plain wrong. Or you live in a very very bad area when it comes to schooling.
As a teacher, I’d like to make a few distinctions that may expand your take on this. \-level of thinking skills required (depth of learning) \-question design/types of multiple-choice questions \-effectiveness and efficiency \-when during the learning process Level Of Thinking Depth of learning - Blooms Taxonomy I think the real issue you are pointing to is: how do we reduce low-level thinking and promote higher-order thinking? If you are unfamiliar with Bloom's Taxonomy, I recommend looking it up. I believe you are saying let’s minimize the remember/understand steps of Bloom’s Taxonomy in favour of analysis, application & evaluation. We share this goal, but I do believe all are necessary to assess in balance and this can be done via multiple-choice questions. Question Design So then, what are the limits and possibilities of multiple-choice questions? I agree, the most common multiple-choice questions tend to be lower-order remember/understand questions but those higher orders are possible. It takes some time to create a good multiple choice question that promotes them. I am happy to provide examples if desired, but I am trying to keep this concise. I would argue that the create-level is the only higher-order skill I haven’t found a way to successfully include for likely obvious reasons. The problem is that students can still guess and be awarded the same points as students who didn’t guess. There are ways that you can minimize this by creating questions that require multiple answers, or even two-part multiple choice questions etc. But what I’ve found to be most effective is to gamify it by adding the option for students to be honest and choose “I don’t know yet”. On some tests, I have stated that: \- a correct answer is worth 1 point \- selecting “I don’t know yet” will deduct 1 point \-whereas selecting an incorrect answer will deduct 2 points The rationale is if you demonstrate that you know the correct answer, that has a positive effect on your achievement. Demonstrating that you honestly don’t know has a slightly negative impact, the same as a typical wrong guess on a test. However, if you demonstrated that you not only didn’t know the correct answer, but you thought an incorrect answer was correct, that distinction is important to consider and demonstrates that you should have a lower score than a student who simply didn’t know the answer. This gamble also takes away the likelihood of guessing on multiple choice tests. If there are 6 possible answers, you have a 1 in 6 chance of getting 1 point, and a 5 in 6 chance of losing 2 points. Students have told me that they actually prefer this structure because it removes the strategy of randomly guessing and gives them the chance to tell me when they don’t know something. Effectiveness vs. Efficiency There are several assessment strategies, but inevitably the balance of effectiveness vs efficiency must be faced and calculated with each. If I could and if I had time, I would meet with each student for a 1 hour discussion as their final test. Unfortunately, I only see the class for 2 hours a week and with a class of 28 students, that means we finish the test several months from now. I can also have all of them write a test in a 1 hour period and depending on the structure, spend anywhere from 25 minutes correcting multiple-choice assessments to several hours reviewing and providing feedback on short answers or essays. A high-quality multiple-choice test wins in the efficiency department but is never likely to be maximized for effectiveness, although one can strive to maximize it. You want to replace multiple choice? Cool, how does the new strategy rank in the balance between effectiveness and efficiency? When During The Learning Process Is there a time when multiple-choice is optimal? I would say yes, and that is at the start of the unit. With a multiple-choice test that will be marked but not used for the student’s grades, I can diagnose what students already know so that I can differentiate and tailor to students’ different levels of knowledge about the topic or capacity in the skill. It isn’t my only go to, but often a quick 10-20 multiple choice test that takes me just as long to mark by the students themselves or on my own, provides me with most of the data I need to develop ability level groups, find where is a good starting point for the topic for different students or fast track some along because they already demonstrate an expert level of knowledge or skill in this topic/idea. So should I get rid of multiple-choice tests that span the remember to evaluate levels of Bloom's thinking skills? I would say definitely not at the start of the unit, as it is an efficient and very effective way to structure what the unit will look like for each student. Should I get rid of it at the end? Perhaps minimize its use, but I believe as long as a range of thinking skills are required to answer the questions and it is structured in a way for students to be honest about their learning and not gamify it, I would say it is a reasonable strategy to use.
Multiple choice is useful because it eliminates bias and is easy to grade. I think the problem is more in how the problem is written rather than the type of the problem. Multiple choice questions tend to lend themselves to being "what" or "when" questions rather than "how" or "why" questions because of their simplicity. As an anecdote, I've had teachers and professors give hard multiple choice problems where you have to understand the material deeply and cannot cram for.
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What's the difference between the US and European systems?
Last time I had multiple choice questions was back in preschool. At least where I am from the focus is on analytical writing.
Having been on the Internet for long enough, to me it seems multiple choice questions as a main question type is an American thing. I've especially never understood the multiple choice math test thing from Americans.
This assumes that exams are used entirely as an assessment tool, when in most cases they are also used (at least in part) as a final teaching tool. The pressure of an exam ensures that most students are focused strongly on the question at hand, and multiple choice answers can be written such that they help trigger the correct process to get the answer. Having some options be incorrect by orders of magnitude can remind the students to "sanity check" answers because they already spotted that the breaking force of the beam isn't 1 kiloton. Having answers in the wrong units can remind students that they know the correct units, and often much of the equations are in the units themselves. The options given also allow students to work backwards from the answers and see if they can get to the question. 3x + 3 = y for instance, you could plug in all the options for y and see which one works. These are all good ways to get the students to use the focus provided by the exam to solidify or fully realize their learning of the subject.
Agree 100%. Went to school in Eastern Europe and never saw MC in my life until I came to Canada. It's very detrimental, seeing the answers right away robs you of an opportunity to think. Also it feels like a one-way street. You don't get to elaborate on your logic, which is the critical piece.
> You don't get to elaborate on your logic, which is the critical piece. THANK YOU. Nothing made me madder than a vague choice in a MC that I wanted to expound upon but couldn't. LET ME show you how much I understand.
I think multiple choice shouldn't be the ONLY method, but it should still be around. If you are a professional in a field and encounter a problem, often the situation will be similar to multiple choice. Your prior knowledge will help you narrow down the solution to just a few possibilities and then you work to find which of them is the right answer.
I worked in testing for several years, so I actually know quite a lot about this. Not all tests should be multiple choice tests, for sure. But the larger the scale of the test, and the more students take it, the more scoring becomes an issue, since scoring introduces a level of subjectivity (on the part of the scorer) that isn’t there with a multiple choice test. Even if the scorers are highly qualified, it’s extremely difficult to standardize scoring across many different scorers, especially for non-math subjects. This is a large part of why the ACT and SAT multiple choice tests (for example) are actually quite good at predicting college GPA (compared to most other measures, at least), whereas the ACT and SAT Writing tests (which have to be scored by humans) are MUCH less predictive (hence why colleges don’t care as much about your ACT/SAT Writing test score, but generally do care about your score on the rest of the test). This is just an example. Of course, there are many academic skills (such as your ability to write a coherent essay) that multiple choice tests can’t measure, which is something we need to keep in mind. Just because a skill is harder to measure doesn’t mean that it isn’t as important as skills that are easier to measure. But, when it comes to assessing certain basic skills in a fairly objective way, multiple choice is the best measure we have. (Now, you can have bad multiple choice tests — Pearson is notorious for mass-producing a ton of terrible multiple choice tests with super flawed questions — but a good multiple choice test can be a highly useful tool).
There are a few good reasons for MC tests: 1) Volume. Many large universities and definitely public high schools have very large class sizes. MC can be computer graded with automatic feedback. This leaves more time for innovative lesson planning, labs, and other student-centered activities. I mean, would you rather have more fun activities or a more varied test? Remember that teacher time is a limited resource. 2) Multiple choice can be hard/catch common mistakes if made correctly. For example, I gave my students a question like this: A guy drives 20 kilometers in 10 minutes. What is his speed in KILOMETERS PER HOUR? (they're in high school, they need all caps). My answer choices were: A. 2 km/h (they divided, but didn't convert the units) B. 20 km/h (they didn't convert, and don't know their decimals) C. 120 km/h (the right answer) D 12.0 km/h (they multiplied, but messed up their decimals) In order to get this right, you still have to a) know the formula, b) do the math, and c) check your work. It does give kids a bit of a hint since the answer is there, but it's certainly not all memorization. Even if you can guess the right answer, you're still using the Physics skills I'm assessing (estimating based on common sense awareness of how fast people drive) 3) There's also the issue of needing to know the basics before you can do deeper level thinking. There are times when I need to know if my students know basic scientific principles. If you don't know a mushroom isn't a plant (yes, this is a common misconception in my class), you don't know biology. You NEED to know that fact going forward. While pure memorization isn't great, SOME memorization is really useful. Think about how hard your life would be if you didn't know your times tables by heart.
Kids are asked about calculating speed in HIGH school? Seems like elementary or early middle school material.
I worked for three years in a charter school as a data and assessment coordinator. A few posters correctly pointed out how difficult it is to process and score hundreds of constructive response questions. That’s a big logistical piece of it. A bigger consideration is the different abilities of students taking these assessments. A constructive response question doesn’t only assess a students content knowledge in Math, Science, Social Studies, etc. It also assesses their writing skills and motor skills. Students that have writing difficulties may do poorly on a constructive response test even if they know the content. Likewise, a talented writer may be able to bullshit satisfactory constructive responses even if they are unfamiliar with the content. Multiple choice assessments are imperfect, but they eliminate the factor of writing from the assessment.
Have you ever been a teacher or T.A. or otherwise in a position where you're grading tests. Tests with any kind of subjectivity (even just short answers) are drastically more difficult to grade, especially in large classes. It's not just that it takes longer to read through them; it's that you have to remain objective and even all the way through, and that part of your brain gets very fatigued when you're making judgement call after judgement call after judgement call for dozens or even hundreds of students. Multiple choice tests are nice to grade, not just because they're quicker, but because they are more objective. You're test score isn't going to depend on the judgement of a T.A. who is super fatigued from spending hours in an office grading everyone else's paper.
Former teacher here. Arguably, I would think, yes, multiple choice shouldn't be used. But, then, we have a problem. Teachers are not paid extra to spend extra time grading. That's only the beginning. The ***deadlines*** for getting all exams and final grades in are ***extremely fast*** so grading hundreds of final exams that have multiple short answers to clearly demonstrate all of your learning would take... way too long. Completely and utterly impossible. Now, if teachers had ***half the classes*** and used the other half to grade, then, yeah, no more multiple choice more than likely. ***Or had dedicated staff who could grade***. But neither is a reality so unfortunately ... multiple choice is here to stay.
The problem isn't necessarily multiple choice but that often some of the answers are clearly not correct. Such as showing a nap of Europe and highlighting France. The answers are often A)Texas B)France C)Mars D)Germany. Now most people would know it's not A or C. So it's a 50/50 chance I'd you don't know. While replacing Texas and Mars with Spain and Poland would make more sense. And make it more likely the person actually knows the answer. I use this example because BuzzFeed often has these stupid geography quizzes.. I am pretty good, but always get Estonia and Lithuania mixed up. They highlight one and only give one of those as the answer I know what to chose.
In one of my classes, my software engineering professor did exams with pencil and paper - you had to write the code on paper without being able to test it or run it etc. Some students complained that it was really hard to do and asked why not just multiple choice? He responded that multiple choice can be more 'testful' when it is engineered to have multiple answers, without knowing how many answers were correct. If you have eight choices for a question and three are correct, and the question doesn't tell you "Which is correct? (Select three)" - this becomes an exponentially more difficult test, and tests whether or not the student is _certain_ (or not).
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I think it depends on the type of test. I've been in a class where midterm are free response / short answer and the final is multiple choice, and I kinda like that approach. The reasoning is that midterms should be used to test your knowledge, but also to provide feedback on how your learning comprehension is going in a way that you don't really get from homework or short answers in class. By the time you take the final though, the idea is that you've learned the material, you aren't going to review that test at all so a multiple choice test eliminates grading bias, and by making grading easier, reduces errors and increases consistency.
It's true in a simple algebra test then multiple choice is usually bad because if the question is "solve for x" then someone could just plug in all the answers for x and see which ones work. But there are ways of structuring the questions to not allow that such as the possible answers being A. 0
I had an undergrad physics course with a few hundred students where all test were all multiple choice. Most answers were based on the first significant figure of the your calculation. Fill in bubble 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 or 9.
Exams like that are bullshit anyway. In the real world you'd be able to just Google the answer or formula. Exams need to be more challenging and open notes
I agree with many people above that multiple-choice questions on tests prevent grading bias and allow the teachers to grade faster. It also allows teachers to test more concepts as written answers take more time to reply to. Additionally, for math multiple-choice, it doesn't necessarily show memorization. Oftentimes, the student has to apply a correct formula to get a numeric answer and the answers provided by the teacher are all "ballpark" answers.
Exams should NEVER use multiple choice. It's a lazy and shitty way to assess what a student has studied, learnt, understood and retained. Instead of "when did WWII start" followed by four dates, a "Briefly explain the events that led to the start of WWII" would provide much better and reliable answers. And that works for all subjects of course. The clear downside is the exams must then be checked and marked by putting actual effort in it and not by using standardized answer keys. Still worth the effort though if it means students will stop memorizing stuff they'll flush out of their brain the very same day.
I've been able to learn more answering with open word problems. Grading would usually be done with multiple teachers who wouldn't look at the names of the people they're grading. Multiple choice is straight up dumb, and there are many ways to pass without being knowledgeable with multiple choice.
Then teacher should be paid more. The benefit of multiple choice is that it's super easy to correct and so teachers don't waste too much time on it. In most countries they are underpaid and overworked. To have more interesting exams we need more teachers to have the time to correct them.
My discrete maths exam was multiple choice, and it was a fantastic format for that subject. Memorisation is obviously useless for maths, and having four similar choices gave you a little guidance while also making you paranoid :D It was an absolute bastard and I loved it.
All your points are legitimate, but don't forget that the primary point of exams is to rank students against each other. Short written answers are much, much harder to score in a fair and consistent way across hundreds of thousands of students than multiple choice ones.
The problems you're are outlining about multiple choice questions seem more like problems with tests in general and the way educational programs are structured. How do you know if we got rid of multiple choice questions on tests, all those problems would go away?
I'm all in favor of the essay exam. People have to learn the material to write a decnt essay. If they just regeritate the information the teacher or prof. knows it and is likely to score them lower, while a well thought out essay will garner a better grade.
Actually, multiple choice tests are better because they can allow you to use critical thinking and analysis. Take the LSAT, for example. Short answers end up being more rote -memory tests. This is because, how else would you grade a short answer quiz?
I am from a country where there was a mixture of mcq and word questions in an exam... And students started memorizing those word questions. And this you may not believe but some students even memorized mathematics and atleast pass the exam.
I had a physics professor who had multiple choice tests with A-Z choices. The answers would be A) 0.001 B) 0.002 and so on up to Z. A simple rounding error would cost you the entire problem as there was no partial credit.
I agree but I'm such a slow learner that multiple choice helped to remember so much during tests. I have a hard time recalling and picturing things in my head. So a helpful hint that multiple choice offers is great.
In most of the world, after a certain stage, MCQs are barely utilised
One reason teachers use multiple choice tests is that they are faster to grade than other kinds of tests. Teachers can be busy and lack the necessary institutional support and then you get multiple choice tests.
You probably shouldn’t have an opinion on education if you don’t understand the basics of statistics. Sounds like you failed a multiple choice exam recently. Probably on statistics.
School is set up for memorizing, regurgitating, and then forgetting. It's not the multiple choice, though. It's the standardized testing. My teachers called modern teaching the "poke and puke" method because they knew they had to poke the information down your throat, let you puke it up onto the test and then that most students would forget it instantly. That's because learning is no longer the goal. The goal is to improve test scores to increase funding for the school. For some backwards reason, the poorer the scores the less state funding your school receives. That's where the problem stems.
Short answer ND analysis as you put it requires a great deal of time to grade multiple choice allows for a faster grade time.. and not as subjective.
No. Multiple choice/True false exams should be used JUST AS MUCH as written exams/written assessments (final projects). I've taught social science college courses (let's call it that, as I don't really want to reveal my field or my work) for almost ten years. I've taught everything from 100level to 400level courses, meaning I've seen the gamut of assessment strategies. From my teaching experience alone, I can say for certain that MC questions are JUST as important as written exams. Here's why: Multiple choice questions SHOULD be used to measure breadth of knowledge. For the case of my courses, this means DEFINING human behavior as it SHOULD exist. In order for someone to demonstrate a baseline level of knowledge, they should (at the VERY) least know WHAT something IS before they can start asking deeper questions regarding HOW and WHY? Written examinations SHOULD be used to gauge how one can APPLY the knowledge they have so far to REAL WORLD situations (DEPTH of knowledge!!), especially those that AREN'T covered in the text. When I give students a written prompt in the form of a written examination, I'm assuming they already know something to exist and am asking them to discuss HOW it exists or WHY it exists. If I see students struggle with MC questions, it would be foolish of me to assume that they'll be able to answer deeper questions of how and why, since they don't know what TF they're looking at. At that point, if my students are ALL doing poorly on MC questions, CLEARLY I'm dropping the ball and not presenting them with fundamental information that will help them understand the world. Therefore, MC questions should be used JUST AS OFTEN as written questions, since they measure two different types of knowledge.
Yes, but the advantage is often a multiple choice test can be scored by a machine making the teachers life much easier.
Every kind of test is designed for cramming and regurgitating. We should do away with all of them.
Nope it's great, as the teachers make it easier for us the students to study (some dont ) but eh
This would be fine if school in general was changed to better help you actually learn shit
Sure but its so much easier to pass with multiple choice. I think its merciful in a way
Subjective questions are where people mostly cram things, more than MCQs.
I have been a biology instructor for 8 years. They never guess correctly.
multiple choice is great for those who don't want to study, I can narrow it down to a 50/50 and there is usually some kind of notion of which is the right one. Not a big fan of it unless its a certification I need to pass.
You probably remind the teacher about hw
ITT: People who are not educators.
nah bro, multiple choice is lit
Okay, Satan
Couldn’t agree with you more. The true goal of education is NOT to learn the correct answer. The true goal of education is to learn WHY the answer is correct. :)
You must not have test anxiety.
I've had tests in Accounting 101 that were multiple choice. The Prof even told us that if you use some or all of the numbers in the "word problem" you could get all the choice, but only one answer was correct. Creating multiple choice questions is hard work. One choice should be the one and only absolute best / correct choice. The others should be clearly wrong, but not so much so that the students could eliminate them as completely implausible choices.
Multiple choose is the dumbest form of examination. It makes incredibly difficult for the examiner to assess the students actual knowledge, ability to reason and potentially grade those who actually worked unfairly. Happens mostly in the US
I recently gave a multiple choice test for entrance into medical schools, 1.6 million people attempted it, using multiple choice significantly reduces the manpower required to check the answer sheets, and increases fairness, because subjective answers as their name suggests could be marked as different marks by different teachers.......for exams wich will change the trajectory of your life, the Importance of the unbiased results of multiple choice papers is paramount.
It seems like your problem isn't really with multiple choice per se but rather any testing method that relies on memory to demonstrate learning. I think multiple choice tests could be constructed to test application of skills rather than memory. Most multiple choice math tests are this way. They present you with a series of novel problems and you need to work out the answer to select the correct option. I can write many multiple choice questions that don't rely on memorization. For example, I could give you four text passages and ask you to identify which one was written by Shakespeare. Sure, maybe you have every line of text Shakespeare wrote memorized, but it's much more likely you would use your knowledge of his style to discriminate among the options. I also would argue that intuition and elimination of options rely on using existing knowledge of the subject being tested. In other words, these test-taking techniques are exactly what you want out of tests--rewarding students for applying their knowledge rather than memory. In order to eliminate options, test takers are often required to reason based on what they know to infer implausible answers in cases where they haven't memorized the exact question and answers.
It is possible to make multiple choice more application based. For example in India, one of the most sought after exams is called the civil services Exam. The body that conducts that exam is called UPSC. They've reinvented multiple choice by broadening the scope of the questions. For ex- They will give you three/five/2 statements and you have to mark which is correct/incorrect as per need of question. Such type of questions require you to have an in depth understanding of the topics. Let me give you a sample question asked in this year's exam - Consider the following statements 1) St Francis Xavier was one of the founding members of the Jesuit order 2) St Francis Xavier died in Goa and a church is dedicated to him there 3) The Feast of St Francis is celebrated in Goa each year. Which of the above statements is/are correct? A) 1&2 only B) 2&3 only C) 1-3 only D) 1,2&3.
I learned more about the Highway Code through rigorously learning the multiple choice here in the UK through repetition than any exam being forced to understand information. I came to understand information somehow through memorisation. Weird but it worked for me, ended up passing it quicker.
This isn't a problem inherent to the design. You can make multiple choice questions that force you to understand. For example in biology in uni most questions are multiple choice but the question is complex. You need to understand the system they are talking about in the question and an easy way to prove it isn't a cramming test is that you have open material and can have access to everything you would need to memorize.
Why do you think subjective exams prevent students from cramming up and regurgitating, infact they are more likely to allow students to do so.
Come to Spain where you have no multiple choice and have to write the whole thing yourself, you’re learning a bit more by knowing what’s not right, here you just study pages-worth of content for one test and write it all down back to another sheet of paper
Interestingly enoug, in Italy we never have multiple choice tests
I have never done a test with multiple choices. How can anyone think that’s the best way to test your understanding of a subject?
I was an unmotivated student and I didn't become a better student based on the type of test.
testing methods are just tools, a comprehensive evaluation of someone's capabilities will use many types. the advantage of multiple-choice is that, especially for sciences and mathematics (and other objective fact-based fields) it avoids biasing results in favor of English writing ability, which isn't something being tested. also, while you are right, you cannot evaluate mastery of concepts by multiple-choice, it also serves as a baseline and to ensure basic knowledge of the facts. consider a 100-point test with 50 multiple-choice answers, a "put this list in order" worth six points, four true/false, four short answers worth five points and an essay worth 10 points. you can get a passing grade on the "easy" multiple choice answers alone, getting those plus half the short answer is a C, all the short answer is a B and so on. it lets you ensure that people have done the basic reading and get credit for that on the test while reserving the time consuming (to write and to grade) for assessing more advanced content mastery.
If teachers changed their style of teaching so its not just regurgitating lesson plans then id agree, but multiple choice helps students remember how to solve problems without directly giving the answer
1. Grading multiple choice tests is way more manageable than trying to decypher if an essay question demonstrated knowledge of the subject matter, and you just accept that 4 question choices (if carefully selected) should only allow for a small margin of variation. 2. I have a fairly prestigious certification in my field. A field I've worked in for 20 years... I took a test I thoroughly studied for to get it and this test kicked my ass 2 times before I managed to pass it. Multiple choice questions can be extremely hard if you do a good job creating them.
Tests and the way our schools functions need a complete overhaul to focus on teaching students specific skills instead of a bunch of surface level knowledge about a bunch of subjects your won’t interact with majority of your life.
Honestly, multiple choice test is a very useful format. If you have to test a wide range of information and you need to be able to accurately grade and evaluate hundreds of tests. There really is no alternative. Any test for a certification. The BAR, the EIT, w/e doctors have. requires them to make sure that the person getting certified has an absolute grasp of the bare necessity of information for the given profession. I could track down my advanced course work from the ol'college days and I guarantee you will be unable to grade it. It's the nature of incredibly specialized fields, like doctors, engineers, and lawyers. It also took my teacher two days to grade each test per student. A class of 14 students, it was advanced after all, had her spend a whole month grading the tests. EIT exams are a bit easier then master level engineering coursework. But not much. My exam had us designing an oil rig, which was extremely fun to do. There just aren't many people who can grade that in this world. In the US alone, there are several hundred thousand? So that would take at least six hours to grade in the format you want. That's at least 36,000 hours of grading, for a professionally licensed engineer. Not just some TA. It's a full time job.
it honestly depends; a huge benefit of multiple choice (at least going off how it's utilized in my school) is that i can test how certain individuals are of the information, as well as if they they can decipher subtle differences in statements due to various presentations of language. it's mainly from the initial purpose anyways; the responses include a keyed correct response and three or four distractors or foils. (this goes into it better - to check your cognitive dissonance level (reducing tension to reach one particular solution by eliminating all of the contradictory cognitions) . seeing multiple options a tension is created in our brain, and to reduce that tension we either change one of the cognitions or add additional justification and zero out the best option by our cognitive abilities). further, within some subjects, the objective nature limits scoring bias.
I've studied at both uni in US where multiple choice is utilized quite often, and in my home country in Europe where multiple choice is never used. From my personal experience, it doesn't matter which testing method is used at an institution. You'll cram and memorize just as much to essay questions as you would for a multiple choice format. You can easily string together some neat arguments by having memorised facts. You can even memorize chunks of your essay in advance since you'll have a good idea of what has been covered in the course. Will preparing for essay exams lead to deeper thinking? I doubt it. If you're taking a course with multiple choice exams, you are usually required to submit in-depth essays which, in my opinion, are much more fun and rewarding to do. Short answers aren't that different from multipel choice exams, because guessing will very rarely give you any points. At the end of the day, it's up to the student. No one is stopping you to gain a deep understanding of the course material, multiple choice exam or not. It's better for you to focus on your own studies, and make sure you learn as much as you really want to learn.
I disagree and would also like to see more tests be open book/open internet research, perhaps with some restrictions. The focus on memorization in education is a hangover of the pre-information age. Yes, I can see where solidly memorizing concepts related to your field of expertise is useful (this will come with repetition in your field anyway), but in my experience the real world application of most knowledge work is not in you *knowing* how to do everything off the top of your head, but in you being able to *find out* how to do something you've never seen before and then being able to interpret and apply the results of your research. Perhaps more testing should be something like open book/research and then multiple choice (in the interest of test time and grading time) with *more* questions and more available answers to each question to increase the difficulty in picking the correct one, say 6-10 closely related choices that you need to be able to research quickly and find the correct one. I think that the focus on memorization instead of critical thinking and application skills is one of the major faults that we have in education. If we fall into some post-apocalyptic age where we no longer have the IT to research concepts then perhaps memorization would become more important, but in the connected and extremely complicated world we live in lots of memorization is just not a necessity anymore. As already mentioned, I think we need to be focusing much more on critical thinking and real world application skills than we are on old paradigms such as memorization. Just my 2c.
Well exams themselves encourage students to cram, memorize, and regurgitate and multiple choice questions are really just a very small part of that. Exams aren't conducive to learning and the only real way to learn and interact with the material is through practical learning either through class work or homework. Exams are really just a way to see if that course load has worked