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Do you think education systems should use multiple choice exams?
Meiyjhe wrote:
Open questions are a way more fair way of judging someones skill than multiple choice questions. Not only does multiple choice have a bit of luck, any answer is either 100% wrong or 100% right. Often the biggest difficulity that lies in multiple choice questions is that they sometimes try to trick you with 2 very similar answers where only one of them is correct, which is obviously not cool. However, the problem with open questions lies with the teachers that are looking into the answers. Whereas one would expect you to write A, the other one expects you to write B, which can be a real pain in the *** from time to time. Also, if there is something like a listening test, anything very timebound really, you don't want to think too much about your answer and fall behind.
So in general, I think a combination of both multiple choice and open questions would be best.
If there is a huge national exam where multiple teachers will check the answers, then I'd say full open questions.
If there is a test that will require you to pay attention to a certain audio/video, then I'd say full multiple choice questions.
So in general, I think a combination of both multiple choice and open questions would be best.
If there is a huge national exam where multiple teachers will check the answers, then I'd say full open questions.
If there is a test that will require you to pay attention to a certain audio/video, then I'd say full multiple choice questions.
And that is where school fails in most places.
In my experience in Germany's Gymnasien (kinda the better school to go to get a degree making you able to join university), teachers will check your way of explaining your answers.
If it's maths they will look at your process and decide if it was right or just luck (cause maths), if it is something philosophical or stuff like history they will read through it and try to understand your thought process.
And my history teacher always told me that my answer can be as ******ed and **** as possible, as long as I manage to properly explain and connect it to history he will give me points, and this is what helped me lol.
This also obviously makes the answer A better, answer B acceptable, but if student C fails to properly explain and put his answer C in a coherent way there will be no points, sounds fair to me tho.
xIchi wrote:
And that is where school fails in most places.
In my experience in Germany's Gymnasien (kinda the better school to go to get a degree making you able to join university), teachers will check your way of explaining your answers.
If it's maths they will look at your process and decide if it was right or just luck (cause maths), if it is something philosophical or stuff like history they will read through it and try to understand your thought process.
And my history teacher always told me that my answer can be as ******ed and **** as possible, as long as I manage to properly explain and connect it to history he will give me points, and this is what helped me lol.
This also obviously makes the answer A better, answer B acceptable, but if student C fails to properly explain and put his answer C in a coherent way there will be no points, sounds fair to me tho.
Yeah, kinda the same system here in Finland as well (Svenska: gymnasiet, Finnish: lukio, English: upper secondary school). A good example could be our last maths test where max points were 10 points and you had to do 4 calculations out of 6. You got 4 points for right answers and 6 points if you had the correct calculation expression (1 point for each right answer and 1.25 for each right expression). To pass the test you needed 5 points out of the ten, which means that only by knowing how to calculate them or simplify them you already passed the test and got a "decent" or "good" grade. With correct answers you got either "perfect" or "excellent" grade.
The same with psychology exam. Maximum of 124 points and you got over half of them (I think 74 or something like that) if you just had proper reasoning behind your final answer. Having the correct answer got you the rest of the points.
I think the most important part about exams is to test the knowledge and understanding of the student rather than can he get the exactly correct answer. If the student already understands the concept he can easily learn how to forge a good and correct answer in no time (given that you actually practice it a bit).
First, I seriously want ABC Australia to tighten up their editing. It ain't okay to mix up "affective" and "effective" like that, ABC Australia. They mean very different things.
Multiple choice questions are okay to test rote memorization, which is a seriously important part of acquiring knowledge. (To take the paramedic example, I probably wouldn't trust a paramedic who hadn't memorized a lot of anatomy and pharmacology, even if they are great at applying what they do know.) More open-ended question types (fill in the blank, etc.) are just as good at this, however, so the main reason to use multiple choice these days is for automatic grading. It's waaaay easier to grade a couple hundred (or thousand) exams of several dozen questions each if you can just feed them through a machine and get it to spit out grades.
As for this idea that having multiple choices isn't representative of the real world... I'm really not sure. Having been in the real world for a bit, there's a surprising amount of being an adult that's just ********ting your way through life and hoping that you haven't screwed something up. I'm not really that persuaded that teaching people the valuable skill of being able to select the best choice even when they don't really know what the hell they're doing is a bad thing. Also, I don't think that it's fair to suggest that there's absolutely no knowledge involved in guessing; you do actually have to know stuff to eliminate one or two of four answers.
Of course, one other thing that we really need to ask ourselves is what the purpose of exams themselves are. 'Cuz it seems to me that multiple choice questions are a tool, and like all tools they are useful when used properly. But not all tools are useful for all purposes; if your exams aren't testing rote memorization, multiple choice questions probably aren't what you want. I think it's pretty obvious that rote memorization is important--you can't apply knowledge without knowing things in the first place--and that it's also hardly the whole story when it comes to education. No amount of memorizing dates will teach someone history, but it's also pretty hard to actually do history if you don't know what things happened when (and what other people think they mean).
One thing that I'm very sure exams are not for is measuring intelligence (except maybe the IQ exam). They're testing whether or not you know certain things, not whether you're smart.
Multiple choice questions are okay to test rote memorization, which is a seriously important part of acquiring knowledge. (To take the paramedic example, I probably wouldn't trust a paramedic who hadn't memorized a lot of anatomy and pharmacology, even if they are great at applying what they do know.) More open-ended question types (fill in the blank, etc.) are just as good at this, however, so the main reason to use multiple choice these days is for automatic grading. It's waaaay easier to grade a couple hundred (or thousand) exams of several dozen questions each if you can just feed them through a machine and get it to spit out grades.
As for this idea that having multiple choices isn't representative of the real world... I'm really not sure. Having been in the real world for a bit, there's a surprising amount of being an adult that's just ********ting your way through life and hoping that you haven't screwed something up. I'm not really that persuaded that teaching people the valuable skill of being able to select the best choice even when they don't really know what the hell they're doing is a bad thing. Also, I don't think that it's fair to suggest that there's absolutely no knowledge involved in guessing; you do actually have to know stuff to eliminate one or two of four answers.
Of course, one other thing that we really need to ask ourselves is what the purpose of exams themselves are. 'Cuz it seems to me that multiple choice questions are a tool, and like all tools they are useful when used properly. But not all tools are useful for all purposes; if your exams aren't testing rote memorization, multiple choice questions probably aren't what you want. I think it's pretty obvious that rote memorization is important--you can't apply knowledge without knowing things in the first place--and that it's also hardly the whole story when it comes to education. No amount of memorizing dates will teach someone history, but it's also pretty hard to actually do history if you don't know what things happened when (and what other people think they mean).
One thing that I'm very sure exams are not for is measuring intelligence (except maybe the IQ exam). They're testing whether or not you know certain things, not whether you're smart.
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After 9th grade in Finland, we have listening comprehensions in multiple languages and they're all multiple choice exams. In other subjects usually at least 1 part of the test includes multiple choice questions.
I like them pretty much, like even if you don't understand a thing, you go with the
dinosaur tactic and draw a dinosaur from the dots and still have 33% chance to get it right.
I like them pretty much, like even if you don't understand a thing, you go with the
dinosaur tactic and draw a dinosaur from the dots and still have 33% chance to get it right.
"A person giving you advice isn't perfect and has their own shortcomings but they may give you the piece that you're missing."
lifebaka wrote:
One thing that I'm very sure exams are not for is measuring intelligence (except maybe the IQ exam). They're testing whether or not you know certain things, not whether you're smart.
Agree 100%. Not even ashamed to say that I passed my Psychology multiple choice exams either from eliminating, guessing, or just plain remembering a certain fact or statistic that appeared in the exam.
But just because I remembered the Piaget terms "assimilation" and "adaption", doesn't mean I actually know how to apply those terms to a real life example (though I do now, thanks Wikipedia, you taught me more than what I failed to learn at uni).
Joxuu wrote:
I like them pretty much, like even if you don't understand a thing, you go with the
dinosaur tactic and draw a dinosaur from the dots and still have 33% chance to get it right.
dinosaur tactic and draw a dinosaur from the dots and still have 33% chance to get it right.
LOL! I've never heard of that :P
Thanks for all the responses guys. I think I'll do my best to avoid multiple choice questions in the future. I mean, sometimes they seem okay. For instance "Analyse this timeline. Which year did the x dynasty invade x?" - having a bunch of answers here would be fine, as you're just testing the student's ability to read a timeline.
However, a better question would be "Briefly report x dynasty's reign in the x Age", which ALSO tests the student's ability to read a timeline, but also asks them to apply said knowledge in a short response answer.
I'm not sure. It was so clear to me earlier that multiple choice exams were terrible, but like LifeBaka said, it's a tool - you need to use it for the right purpose. I'll wait for more responses before finalising my viewpoint.
I really think the general way people are educated here is pretty dumb. I had the unfortunate issue of being entirely bored in nearly every class I ever took because I'd immediately pick up concepts and be able to pull off good grades on tests without studying, whether multiple choice or not. Everything is catered toward the dumbest students in the classes to feign intelligence with higher test grades, rather than focusing on giving students a working knowledge of a topic. I think the only useful class I ever took before college was the organic chemistry class I took in my last year of high school. Almost every other class I took I could pull off high b's/low a's in without doing 90% of the actual homework and not studying for tests.
I think it depends on n - your sample size. If you are a large educational board member of say, something like a city's public schools, and you designed an open response section for a standardized test for hundreds of thousands of student, grading would be very expensive, slow, and inconsistent.
Having something like a multiple choice exam allows for fast, comparatively low cost, and accurate feedback, and would act as a good way to look at students' performances in aggregate (that is, to say that while test scores would vary from student to student, luck would almost cancel itself out when comparing bodies of students, like school.
I think the best way to test students is to test them in an environment where they can show off their excellence. One of my friends is a Graduate Student, and he says that what he has found very effective with his students, is testing them in such a manner where they can show off their knowledge. He does this by way of writing a test with a couple brutally hard open response test questions that force the test taker to really apply what they learned in class, while also paving a road with which students can continue to advance their studies in that area. These kinds of tests allow him to see what material could have been taught better; Additionally, he can normalize the test scores (scaling accordingly), and which students really excel at what they do, as well as see which kids are struggling
Having something like a multiple choice exam allows for fast, comparatively low cost, and accurate feedback, and would act as a good way to look at students' performances in aggregate (that is, to say that while test scores would vary from student to student, luck would almost cancel itself out when comparing bodies of students, like school.
I think the best way to test students is to test them in an environment where they can show off their excellence. One of my friends is a Graduate Student, and he says that what he has found very effective with his students, is testing them in such a manner where they can show off their knowledge. He does this by way of writing a test with a couple brutally hard open response test questions that force the test taker to really apply what they learned in class, while also paving a road with which students can continue to advance their studies in that area. These kinds of tests allow him to see what material could have been taught better; Additionally, he can normalize the test scores (scaling accordingly), and which students really excel at what they do, as well as see which kids are struggling
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Multiple Choice has the advantage of teaching students something as it forces them to really think about it. If a student has no idea about what to answer to an open question, then they will just skip it and never really realise what went wrong, unless they really just went out drinking, doing drugs, and having sex instead of studying, but well let's just assume that wasn't the case (even though it always is).
A multiple choice exam simply forces students to think about a question, I mean, yes blindly guessing has a 1 in X (usually 4) chance of answering correctly but actually thinking about it will increase your odds by a good amount. Also, later you'll be able to think back more easily and be like "hmmm what made me go for this instead of the correct answer?" OR "Neat, I got it right, but why is it right?". In either case it's easier to learn and move on whereas on open questions it's easy to just sit there and wonder what the f happened.
For teachers it's also a quick and easy way to poll the students' knowledge on a particular subject without actually putting a whole lot of effort into it. When it comes to actual calculations though, I wouldn't really go with multiple choice, unless you're testing a student's estimation skills.
A multiple choice exam simply forces students to think about a question, I mean, yes blindly guessing has a 1 in X (usually 4) chance of answering correctly but actually thinking about it will increase your odds by a good amount. Also, later you'll be able to think back more easily and be like "hmmm what made me go for this instead of the correct answer?" OR "Neat, I got it right, but why is it right?". In either case it's easier to learn and move on whereas on open questions it's easy to just sit there and wonder what the f happened.
For teachers it's also a quick and easy way to poll the students' knowledge on a particular subject without actually putting a whole lot of effort into it. When it comes to actual calculations though, I wouldn't really go with multiple choice, unless you're testing a student's estimation skills.
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Moreover, if they were in maths, students would have to justify their answers on the paper, the justification representing half of the points.
However, in some specific studies like the medicine studies I'm doing, it's only MPC because it's a competitive exam, and we have a huge bunch of things to learn.
The thing is that we have two different MPCs that I'd translate them to : Single Answer Question and Multiple Answers Question. Obviously, the second one is the hardest because there could possibly be 0 (yes, it happens) to 5 correct answers. And this makes being lucky a 0.03125 probability.
So I guess that you were talking about the Single Answer Question : without talking of the complexity, what I don't like is that you don't know or forget how to write, how to present your arguments, reasoning, etc with words. But it seems to work well to see how much students can learn.