Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 21, 2012

Speaking as a former teacher, BS in essays is easy to catch and fun to tear up.

There’s always hope that something in an essay answer will get you partial credit.

what is the point of essays?

Better still: put your answer in the form of a palindrome, or in the form of an acrostic where both the full text AND the text composed of the first letter of each word form part of the correct answer.

Given how strict the comics page is, I’m surprised this was considered printable.

To state the obvious, both methods should be used. One is quicker, but doesn’t really asses understanding, and an essay question can show a level of understanding, but takes a lot of time to asses. If you can’t explain something, you don’t understand it…

Essay question:1. Shows you remember more. Fewer hints from the question text; no chance of randomly choosing right answer.2. If done well, shows you have ability to reason from one step to the next, or at least remember that it was presented that way. Most jobs rely more on reasoning than just memorizing some facts, so it’s a more important skill to develop.3. NEGATIVE – I’ve also seen questions on tests that were clearly designed to prove that the teacher still knew (or had read) more than the students. (And I’m not talking about “extra credit”.) 4. OTOH: I had one teacher who gave “extra credit” questions who told us during the last class before each test EXACTLY what the extra credit question would be. If you didn’t take the trouble to read the extra few pages, it was your own d*** fault.

Strange that no one mentioned how much time it takes for the teachers to grade essay type exams. . .

My brother once got an essay assignment on the topic “If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, who would you pick…” and he wrote a two page paper on why he wouldn’t invite a dead person to dinner because they pick at their food, smell bad and were poor conversationalists. He got a D for the assignment but an A for original thinking.

We need essay tests for the same reason we need story problems in math: that’s the way the real world works. We aren’t very often confronted with a simple choice of T/F or A-B-B-D, or a problem expressed as X^2+3X+5=0; solve for X. Essay tests and story problems don’t just prove you’ve mastered a particular piece of technique or information; they prove you can actually use it in a real-world situation.

Actually, as a professor, I would say that multiple choice tests, if well crafted and designed are not limiting at all. There are techniques I use in my larger classes that use multiple choice tests, that do test significantly into the higher levels of “Bloom’s Taxonomy”. This is a pedagogic framework that describes different depths of understanding about a topic. The highest levels of “Bloom’s Taxonomy” require abstraction, correlation, and synthesis of bigger ideas from smaller details. Now, in my smaller classes, I tend to use more essays than multiple choice questions, but it is not so much because essay questions are “better”, but because there is also a great value in simply having students write and practice their writing. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++So, in my opinion, both styles of testing are very good and great potential to be excellent methods of assessing student learning…. if used properly and designed creatively.

Tacopielvr….Um….furrykef is referring to the b and s. In my day bs was a bad word.

So he’s a big fan of S, A.

@furrykef is referring to this Frazz strip printed on newspapers (Surprisingly they still exist!) Since they are more family-oriented, the editors have a more restricted rules on what are allowed.

Chill!

You forgot ‘subtract the wrongs to eliminate guessing’

@Varnes: Multiple Choice questions can be built to reflect any of Bloom’s taxonomy objectives. Surely, they absolutely can test understanding or ability to apply theories. I personally use a mix of MCs and essay questions for a variety of other reasons. One thing that multiple choice questions are particularly good in testing is the ability to understand the difference between different concepts.

In a couple of classes in college, the teachers gave multiple choice tests that were kind of “gotcha’s” where even if you really knew the material, it was hard to say if it was one or the other answer because they were both about right. Essay questions would have been easier.