<<As much as I like to use other forms of test items, please don't be
quite so judgemental about multiple choice items. We use a mixture of
multiple choice and other types of questions in most of our classes, and
we also try to implement 'critical thinking'. Guess which variety is
used the most for measuring critical thinking?? Multiple choice!! >>
OK - I'm for a balanced approach - which is one reason I don't go
for multiple choice (mc.) I agree that, if very carefully constructed,
mc can be a legitimate assessment device: ETS and whoever makes the
acturial exams, for instance, I expect are very careful to construct
answer sets that can't be easily sussed out. Wrong answers lose 1/n
points to compensate for guessing and in some instances some answers are
deemed to be "more right" than others and score higher? In any case,
the fundamental flaw remains: the only window on what the thought
processes and manual skills (graphing, constucting tables, writing a
sequence of equivalent equations in a readable format, etc) is which
bubble is filled in. Add to this that many students fill in the wrong
bubble accidentally (hard to believe, but that's what I discovered in a
couple experiments) and you have an assessment tool which has only its
ease of scoring to recommend it. That it's used to measure critical
thinking seems laughable on the face of it...do you have more rationale
to support this?
<<I certainly agree that multiple choice items can be written to measure
a very, very low level of knowledge; I would also assert that a multiple
choice item can be written to measure a deeper understanding of the
material than most short-answer types.>
Nifty assertion! I would assert that most polynomials are of odd
degree - how do we know it's pudding :-?
<< IF a course uses STRICTLY multiple-choice items, this probably does
place some restrictions on the learning that can be assessed -- but the
limits are probably not what we would first think of. >
Using strictly mc most certainly places restriction on what can be
assessed (how do you know how well they can graph a hyperbola?) but
worse, it injects a degree of inaccuracy into the assessment - Juan was
able convert the logarithmic equation into a polynomial equation, write
the polynomial equation in standard form and find two of the five roots.
of which only one checked out. He missed to other legitimate
solutions. How do you measure that on a scale of zero or one?
<< IF we are going to criticize any particular testing method, we should
criticize those tests and quizzes which we write in a hurry with the
assumption that they measure what we thought was important. I suspect
we have all written some very bad items, simply due to not thinking
enough about each item. >
Most of the bad items are my secretary's mistakes: at least that
what I tell the students;-)
Geoff Hagopian
Palm Desert, CA
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