Multiple choice

I’ve resumed a lot of committee duties and one thing I’ve been pushing for the last couple years is more TAs (we have the money) and fewer multiple-choice questions on tests. The argument is always that if we had free form answer there aren’t enough people to grade for the larger early career classes. Hence the need for more TAs. They might be correct because the most I’ve had in a class is ~80 with one TA. I haven’t had any of the 100+. That being said (and typed), I always have free form answer because I feel that best exams test the student’s knowledge. Multiple choice (especially when things are written intentionally to trick the students, like swapping a letter or using quadruple negatives in a sentence) tests will test what a student doesn’t know. I hated them as a student (bear in mind that I did very well on them), and I hate them as a professor. I see it as lazy. I brought this up, and was met with a lot of contention and excuses. And I understand all the points, but part of our job is education in the classroom. We all have busy personal and lab lives that we have to juggle with these teaching loads, but we shouldn’t be just caring about a grade number and trying to trick students into getting questions wrong. We should teach them well, test them for what they know, and assign scores accordingly. I’m all for trick questions, but I’m also for partial credit. If someone set the boundary conditions properly, but I inserted a trick unit mix-up and they screwed up they deserve a lot of credit. A multiple-choice test (unless broken down properly) would give them zero.

One person advocated for a problem broken down into multiple parts, then each part have a multiple-choice questions associated. So, outlining the problem gets a question, BCs get a question, math gets a question, solving then discussion both get questions. Then if they got the question wrong we reevaluate for partial credit. This kind of works, but still doesn’t fully test the students’ knowledge. In addition, this doesn’t work for classes that are, say, more biology-focused. There’s not as much critical thinking in these types of classes (which I do have to teach). In these, I still test them long-form, and I can really tell if a student understands something or not.

I know I’ve made a few enemies and will continue to make more with this campaigning. But I really do think multiple-choice tests are lazy. I will always make time for the students. The same goes for Chalkboard, which I’m forced to use, and which I only use to disseminate documents to my students. Everyone is busy, but students ultimately come first. I would feel bad failing a student for knowing a topic, but unable to decipher the convoluted ways I have to phrase questions to trick them. It’s lazy tests only what students don’t know, and I’m not changing my mind about this.