In praise of multiple choice tests
I have to say I never thought I’d write a post singing the virtues of multiple choice tests (well, sort of). Despite the fact that much of my professional life is dictated by such exams, I’ve never had any overwhelming liking for them. Rather, I’ve generally seen them as a necessary evil, a crudely pragmatic way of assessing fundamental skills on a very large scale. Sure, the logic and elimination aspects are interesting, but they’ve always in comparison to the difficulty of, say, teaching a student to write out a close reading of a passage in their own words. People might argue that learning to do so in irrelevant (obviously I disagree, but I’m not going into that here), but basically no one is disputing that it’s hard. At any rate, I’ve always assumed that given the alternative between an essay-based test and a multiple-choice one, the former would invariably be superior. (more…)