Last week I wrote a post examining the joy of the short answer question instead of the mulitiple choice answer. I’ve always felt that limiting answers is a really boring way to demonstrate knowledge (particulalry in the digital age of answers at your fingertips). Multiple choice questions also don’t allow the student to demonstrate their own unique knowledge about a subject. While I’m certainly able to teach a class I’d be missing out if I only let my own ideas grace the classroom. The students have a way of keeping things up to date. How would I know if they never had the opportunity to share those thoughts with me (particularly the overly shy students who won’t speak up in class).
The first time I realized that there were students who prefered to NOT have opinions was while I was still working on my graduate degree a year or so ago. One of our instructors gave us the task of writing our own final exam questions. We would each write ten questions covering a large book and he would select the questions for the final exam from the questions we provided to him. The course was about a somewhat indistinct field that was emerging in our profession and we read an entire book filled with other peoples’ opinions about the position. It turned out there were people who wanted to hide their own thoughts.
My preference was to ask questions that allowed the student to explore the myriad examples provided to them in the book within specific contexts and through their own experience and sensibility toward the position. I found, however, that some students wanted to have questions like “What did author X say were the eight most important Y in this new field?” They wanted to be able to be certain of the answer they were giving. I, on the other hand, didn’t feel like that type of knowledge (in a book filled with over 30 authors and even more opinions) was even worthwhile. I’ve never thought that art worked like math (and I know high level math is an art). In math there is one answer and in art there are many answers. I still don’t understand the people who want to make art basic math. No multiple choice for me please.