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The Daily Tar Heel

Multiple-choice exams test students' knowledge

TO THE EDITOR:

Testing provides a textbook example of the theory that people tend to favor policies that serve their own self-interests. A recent column and a responding letter to the editor characterize multiple-choice exams as boring focused on trivial facts based on instructor laziness and likely to produce incompetent non-thinkers. It's clear that a monkey randomly selecting answers can expect a 20-25 percent success rate. Such accusations may apply to some multiple-choice exams and some instructors but equally telling criticisms can be applied to almost any testing format.

Essay exams for example rarely cover more than a very small subset of concepts in a course inducing many students to game the system by focusing study on the limited materials they think likely to be tested. Another major flaw with essay testing is that it rewards bright students for what I call Duke answers: Clueless but bright people can expect at least partial credit for meaningless word salads even if they don't know anything about a topic. Intelligence is rewarded but exams ideally test knowledge not mere ability to waffle plausibly based on intuition about what words might mean.

On a more positive note multiple-choice questions can cover far more concepts than most alternative formats providing students with incentives to study assigned materials more diligently. Creative multiple-choice questions can also bridge multiple concepts and require students to solve complex problems. If you doubt this statement please check out a reasonably large selection of the questions on old exams and quizzes posted at my Web site. There are always trade-offs between the techniques used in testing but I suspect that student complaints about certain techniques vis-a-vis other techniques are based in students' senses of personal comparative advantages.


Ralph Byrns
Professor of Economics


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