On multiple choice exams:
“I have to make sure that the wrong answers are wrong in interesting ways, not in ‘duh’ ways... And that the right ones are really right.”
December 12, 2013
"Are the questions too hard? Are they too easy? Did I make all the studying worthwhile for them?"
The professor too is nervous about the exam.
On multiple choice exams:
On multiple choice exams:
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12 comments:
Professor Saffran needs to lose the tea-bag earrings.
Designing test questions is the most difficult part of teaching, at least for me. Putting together lectures and actually teaching is easy compared to that. Most of us who teach in professional schools have no training at all in test design.
What DrMaturin said. Also there is a need to come up with new questions each year, lest someone sell copies of your old exams to this year's students as "exam preparation aids."
Luckily I taught computer science back in the day and multiple-guess exams make no sense. But coming up with interesting code snippets for them to write in the short period of time they have while the exam is going on is a challenge.
You do have to test, though, to verify that the code being written for their homeworks is really done by your students. I didn't want to discourage collaboration -- professional programmers ask each other for help all the time -- but every semester there would be someone paying somebody to write the code for their homework assignments and there is need to find them.
I always prefaced my first exam of the semester and also the final by reminding the students that they didn't have to answer the questions in order and it would help them psychologically to find an easy one and do it first. They never paid attention, but I tried.
I also found test writing very challenging. The separation between a trivial question and a question that is too hard to do in the exam setting is exceedingly thin.
Barthelme has a mid-story questionairre in Snow White, cited here.
Google books omits that page of Snow White so I can't link to it directly.
Yep. Been there, done that. The first exam I gave as a legit tenure track asst prof (not as a GTA) I felt that I was torturing my students. I knew how nervous some were.
It's not a contest to beat the students with a bad grade.
And anyway, often sloppy multiple choice questions have more than one right answer.
Is this Progressive Corruption (PC), Disparate Impact (DI) syndrome, or the more conventional litigationphobia?
There are many types of tests and in general, the easier they are to create, the harder they are to grade and vice-versa. An essay question test is easy to create but difficult to grade. A good multiple-choice test is easy to grade but relatively hard to create.
Some of the most dastardly multiple choice tests are those given by the FAA to pilots. If you're solving a navigation problem and make a typical mistake, you'll find your answer among the choices. Made a different mistake and sure enough, that answer will also be one of the choices. You do the problem and see your answer matches one of the choices but that doesn't mean you got it right. Sneeky bastards, those FAA test writers!
My daughter gained a quiet distinction in medical school because she was asked to sit with the exam review committee to judge appropriateness of questions and language used. She gained that "job" because during her first semester she accurately challenged some profs on the clarity of their questions.
Assignment made up by my husband, for a "music appreciation" class with nine kids in it: Everyone gets an mp3 player with one snippet of a sonata-form movement on it. The task is to listen to your segment and other kids', and get them all into the right order.
It didn't quite come off. We'd made contingency plans for only eight or seven kids showing up, but in the event only six did, so there was some hasty reorganization. The original plan was that the correct order (the mp3 players were lettered A through I) would, correctly ordered, spell out CHAFED BIG, as in "this assignment sure ****** ***." (Hey, it was the best anagram of the first ten letters of the alphabet we could find.) They got the first few letters and the last few, but not the middle.
As a college English teacher, I cringe when I hear professors who use the multiple choice (fill in the right bubble) method of testing knowledge and learning gained while computers grade their exams. No wonder they feel guilt - they should. Shame.
Any decent college prof in any discipline should require a final paper or at the very least a Blue Book essay exam to gauge and evaluate real learning.
Gotta go - 128 final papers to read and evaluate as a real human teacher - not a computer.
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