Rhino's Big Adventures - 23FEB09

[notasccrmom]

I'm definitely in the camp of hating multiple guess exams when it comes to the science/math/engineering topics although I probably couldn't survive the humanities without them. No partial credit is a huge bummer, but also for reasons that Randy pointed out. Some professors get pretty tricky with answer options... you should too!

 

[rhino]

Heh. Did they give any partial credit?

I think a hybrid of free answer and multiple choice would work well, but then grading it would be as much work as a free answer exam since I'd have to assign partial credit.

The kind of exam you describe takes a lot of time and effort compiling the choices for answers!

I'm glad I wasn't in your class.

I don't know about that, Rhino. The hardest test I ever had in my life was first quarter of sophomore year at the institution of higher learning that you and I share in common. It was a multiple choice physics exam. It was the only exam in four years that took me the entire allotted four hours to complete.

And it was only ten questions.

Of course, each of the questions had a dozen answers to choose from. And each of the potential answers was a variant of the correct answer which could be arrived at by losing or gaining a power of ten or two, or by multiplying when you should have divided, or by using an incorrect but closely related constant, or by failing to convert something to the correct units. And this was the day of slide rules. No calculators allowed. In fact, there weren't any calculators really available yet. The HP 35 was just coming out and it cost $350. My Blackberry can do more than that one could.

I wouldn't feel bad about doing multiple choice. Give 'em an experience to remember. I'll never forget mine.

 

[rhino]

I'm definitely in the camp of hating multiple guess exams when it comes to the science/math/engineering topics although I probably couldn't survive the humanities without them. No partial credit is a huge bummer, but also for reasons that Randy pointed out. Some professors get pretty tricky with answer options... you should too!

Man, that would end up being more work than just grading free answer exams, though! I'd have to predict likely mistakes and put them all as choices!

Now that we've gone to the dark side, our goal is to minimize my time and expenditure of effort.