After my rant about multiple choice tests, I’ve noticed a number of other blog posts about multiple choice tests.

• “In Defense of Multiple Choice Tests” by Natalie Barlett on Edudemic talks about the need to make choices in all aspects of our lives. She addresses a study that shows that multiple choice is a good tool to help students remember new and old info. She outlines a number of ways that well written multiple choice questions can be used in classrooms. 

  I don’t disagree with this — what I don’t like about the current multiple choice assessments is that there is so much weight put on these assessments, and that they are almost the sole measure of a student’s learning.

• In “The Real Problem with Multiple Choice Questions” by Terry Heick on TeachThought, the issue is that they create the illusion of right v. wrong. In a world changing at a rapid pace, Heick sees this as the true problem with these questions.

…when a multiple-choice question is given to a student in hopes of measuring how well he or she understands something, it manufacturers the illusion of right and wrong, a binary condition that ignores the endlessly fluid nature of information.