One of the favorite tools for teachers in American high schools is the Scantron. These machine-readable little slips are the key to automating multiple choice tests. Teachers enter the correct answers in the scanning machine before the multiple-choice test even happens. And then students color in the bubbles that correspond to what they think are the right answers on the Scantron slip. Immediately after the test, the teacher gathers all the slips and shove them into the scanning machine. The machine automatically grades everyone's test, and the teacher is saved from having to manually check all the answers.
So prevalent is the Scantron that in many places, they basically become synonymous with the standard high school exam. And for many that went through the American high school system, taking multiple choice exams with Scantrons became a sort of fond memory, not to be repeated in college. Colleges, with their supposedly more rigorous standards, depended much more on essays (in the humanities) and step-by-step calculations/proofs (in the sciences) as means of examination. College students, stressed out by the rigor of college exams, perhaps look back at Scantrons with even more fondness.
Interestingly, a full eleven years after graduating high school, the author is once again sitting in a classroom taking a multiple choice test. No, these are not the difficult multiple choice questions, full of tricks and trap answers, that standardized tests like SATs and GREs offer. Instead, it offers more of a glimpse to the high school days, when multiple choice tests were much more a method of regurgitating memorized knowledge straight from textbooks and lectures. The questions test memory of facts, not comprehension of the questions or answer choices.
Grown adults may sneer at such belated use of the multiple choice as a reasonable format of testing. After years of getting taught in college that learning is much more about critical thinking and not memorizing, graduate school is directly contradicting such a principle. For them, the idea of taking multiple choice test at school just feels too much like the Scantron days of high school, where answers were written in the books, and good grades came from being able to remember them. It represents a more basic, unsophisticated type of learning, one that they felt they had graduated from a long long time ago.
Of course, for most part, grad school involves much more critical thinking than memorizing, and the multiple choice test in question is an anomaly, not a norm. Yet, the strong reaction to the idea of taking a multiple-choice test as a sophisticated grad school student brings forward an interesting point of just how different exam formats can be perceived in different ways. In particular, the idea that multiple choice, just as a format, and not in anyway to do with content, can be seen as "juvenile" and "not befitting for the intellectual forum that is grad school" is quite an eye-opener.
Much of the perception undoubtedly come from one's previous experience with education. Aside from the fond memories, Scantron, for instance, could have represented a sort of restrictive learning environment that public high schools in general represents. By selecting the "right" answer from a bunch of choices, students were being taught in a extremely black-and-white way. They are told to perceive the world, its history and its accumulated knowledge, as a consisting of certain things that are the unarguable, undeniable truths, the same facts that form the very basis of their socialization as economically productive beings of the future.
Yet as these high school students do grow up as economically productive beings, they realize that the world they have to work in is not nearly as black and white as high school multiple-choice tests have they believe. Often ,the "truths" and the "facts" are highly relative and subjective, prone to changes and manipulations by those in power with interests to do so. Hence, what is "right" and "wrong" become much more of an argument, to be conceived through one's own experiences, evidences, and persuasions. Without usually putting it in such words, people learn to perceive such "realism" as part of maturity.
On the flip side is the immature behavior of simply believing what one is told, by the media, those in positions of authority, and most blatantly, schools and their textbooks. As noted in the previous post, the sense of "expertise" that academics seek to monopolize have made them so much more distant from the common people, who feel the academics' isolation from the "real world" made them less and less believable as productive contributor of social capital and knowledge. Perhaps testing formats like multiple choice tests, is an extension of such attempted monopoly, only trustable by high school students still without a sense of cynicism.
So prevalent is the Scantron that in many places, they basically become synonymous with the standard high school exam. And for many that went through the American high school system, taking multiple choice exams with Scantrons became a sort of fond memory, not to be repeated in college. Colleges, with their supposedly more rigorous standards, depended much more on essays (in the humanities) and step-by-step calculations/proofs (in the sciences) as means of examination. College students, stressed out by the rigor of college exams, perhaps look back at Scantrons with even more fondness.
Interestingly, a full eleven years after graduating high school, the author is once again sitting in a classroom taking a multiple choice test. No, these are not the difficult multiple choice questions, full of tricks and trap answers, that standardized tests like SATs and GREs offer. Instead, it offers more of a glimpse to the high school days, when multiple choice tests were much more a method of regurgitating memorized knowledge straight from textbooks and lectures. The questions test memory of facts, not comprehension of the questions or answer choices.
Grown adults may sneer at such belated use of the multiple choice as a reasonable format of testing. After years of getting taught in college that learning is much more about critical thinking and not memorizing, graduate school is directly contradicting such a principle. For them, the idea of taking multiple choice test at school just feels too much like the Scantron days of high school, where answers were written in the books, and good grades came from being able to remember them. It represents a more basic, unsophisticated type of learning, one that they felt they had graduated from a long long time ago.
Of course, for most part, grad school involves much more critical thinking than memorizing, and the multiple choice test in question is an anomaly, not a norm. Yet, the strong reaction to the idea of taking a multiple-choice test as a sophisticated grad school student brings forward an interesting point of just how different exam formats can be perceived in different ways. In particular, the idea that multiple choice, just as a format, and not in anyway to do with content, can be seen as "juvenile" and "not befitting for the intellectual forum that is grad school" is quite an eye-opener.
Much of the perception undoubtedly come from one's previous experience with education. Aside from the fond memories, Scantron, for instance, could have represented a sort of restrictive learning environment that public high schools in general represents. By selecting the "right" answer from a bunch of choices, students were being taught in a extremely black-and-white way. They are told to perceive the world, its history and its accumulated knowledge, as a consisting of certain things that are the unarguable, undeniable truths, the same facts that form the very basis of their socialization as economically productive beings of the future.
Yet as these high school students do grow up as economically productive beings, they realize that the world they have to work in is not nearly as black and white as high school multiple-choice tests have they believe. Often ,the "truths" and the "facts" are highly relative and subjective, prone to changes and manipulations by those in power with interests to do so. Hence, what is "right" and "wrong" become much more of an argument, to be conceived through one's own experiences, evidences, and persuasions. Without usually putting it in such words, people learn to perceive such "realism" as part of maturity.
On the flip side is the immature behavior of simply believing what one is told, by the media, those in positions of authority, and most blatantly, schools and their textbooks. As noted in the previous post, the sense of "expertise" that academics seek to monopolize have made them so much more distant from the common people, who feel the academics' isolation from the "real world" made them less and less believable as productive contributor of social capital and knowledge. Perhaps testing formats like multiple choice tests, is an extension of such attempted monopoly, only trustable by high school students still without a sense of cynicism.
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