Something I found useful was the realisation that pretty often the wrong answers are derived from the right answer, with maybe a random outlier thrown in as an attempt to make it less obvious. From that you can sort of triangulate on the correct answer. For example, if the choices are:
a) 123
b) 12.3
c) 13.4
d) 57.2
The answer is surely (b).
I always liked âmystical guessâ
Well, of course it is!
(But yeah, test writers make this mistake all the time. Itâs tough to avoid âtellsâ in your distractors, if youâre limited to answers the test taker could conceivably arrive at.)
Speaking as a chemistry professor who will sometimes resort to a limited number of multiple choice questions on exams in high-enrollment courses, let me just say:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh, youâre adorable. See you next year.
I sincerely hope no one is giving multiple choice exams to grad students.
This is not at all what I said, I said the assumptions about your field about certain items are going to be a lot more nuanced at the graduate level than at the undergrad. Right or wrong, undergrad is taught in broad strokesâŚoh this is ALWAYS the case. This NEVER happens. And if you are a good instructor, you tell the students that for the sake of the class, this is the answer but that they may encounter instances that are being investigated and studied that may eventually disprove this notionâŚbut for the sake of the class and testing (especially if you are forced to use a commercial testing bankâŚwhere you might be able to remove questions, but no add themâŚthis is more on the computerized testing side) you should focus on the broad strokes.
Again, when I teach, I tell students to write down WHY they think something is right or wrongâŚand if they have a problem with their grade, I go back to this sheet and adjust (though I can adjust down if they game the system too!)
That said, grad students get multiple choice in almost every class. Grad school isnât like it was in the '70s where you take a class, you get ABSOLUTELY NO FEEDBACK THROUGHOUT and then you spend a week doing nothing but writing in class, proving you understood what the professor that demanded no discussion nor conversation about subjects that are by every measure advanced topics. Unless you go to law schoolâŚthey still do this shit. These days, you need feedbackâŚmultiple choice is a good way of giving it to the student. Of course, you still give long answer because you need to know critical thinking is going on â and every one of my professors at my grad school made it clear that getting anything less than a B on a long form writing exam meant that you most likely were not going to pass the class and the MC portion would get marked down to the lower score too.
Ridiculously broad generalizations are ridiculous. You understand that you are making the same kind of absolutist black/white declarations that you are railing against, right?
I donât teach my students to think in terms of always/never (unless itâs true), even in underrgrad. I train my students to recognize continua and avoid false dichotomies, and I do that in my first-year courses. Not once, neither as student nor professor, have I ever written or given an assessment in a graduate course that involved multiple choice.
The rule at my high school was, when taking the notoriously difficult multiple choice tests of one teacher: Whack the four fingers of your hand against a table. Label them mentally A B C D from left to right. The finger that hurts the most is the correct answer.
Undergrad is mostly about getting knowledge in. The real learning happens later. Unless you are going to a technical school, you are going to be inundated with so much knowledge that it kinda as to happen.
And again, I specifically tell students that they should understand the material for the class. I will occasionally go into different research, or different models explaining why it isnât ALWAYS the case, but we are talking rule of thumb for undergrads. This is the case more often than not when it is a survey class. Where a lot is out of my hands, which is why as Iâve now stated twice, I encourage critical thinking even on a multiple choice exam.
As for YOU not giving any in a graduate course? It just means you are missing a means to provide quick feedback to students. My field is specifically assessment / psychometricsâŚso I understand what these things measure. Iâm also a big fan of a metric that will help them figure out where they are in relationship to the knowledge. Grad school? Iâd most CERTAINLY hope these are counted far less in the final grade, but to me, these are for the students. I can give them on a much more regular interval and honestly? I know what they are measuringâŚa lot of professors have a bad taste left in their mouths because of them and refuse to admit there is any use nor validity. If you look at them as the be-all end-all of testing, you are going to encourage students not to learn. All tests fail to assess knowledgeâŚevery single one is a compromise to one extent or another. And yetâŚwe still do them.
What department is this? In all my grad school classes (this is not taking comps into account), I only had a few classes where I had exams as opposed to either historiographic essays or research papers - my language classes (neither of which were multiple choice) and 2 classes, which had written mid-terms. No multiple choice tests at that level though - but itâs history and writing and evaluating is what we are working to hone. Maybe the difference is by department?
I pity your undergraduates. They should find a better school.
No, it just means I use a better one.
Exactly what point are you trying to make, clifyt? You began with sweeping generalizations about the nature of undergrad vs grad courses. I pointed out that your generalizations were false, but rather than either acknowledge your error or provide evidence in support of your assertion, instead you seem to have changed the subject, so that now you appear to be making an argument about whether multiple choice questions are a valid form of assessment. (And in part contradicted yourself by doing so: first you assert that all undergrad courses are taught in broad strokes and superficial black/white false dichotomies and are just about knowledge retention, but then you claim that you yourself point out exceptions and encourage critical thinking in such courses.) But the validity of MC wasnât the point of the conversation: the topic was your assertions about the universal use of MC in graduate courses and the superficial nature of undergraduate courses.
Not all undergraduate courses are as superficial as you claim. Mere knowledge isnât understanding; nor is it the ability to apply that knowledge to solve new problems, to analyze and assess information, to or generate new ideas; any decent undergraduate program will foster all those abilities in its students. Multiple choice questions and exams are one possible assessment method, but they arenât suitable to assess all learning outcomes in all disciplines.
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