Students in a history class should be learning how to assess ideas, relate events and motivations, and put their own thoughts on paper in a coherent way. They should NOT be answering questions like "Which of the following was NOT an Axis power in 1944?" These questions create factoids out of information.
This sort of thing is worse when the answers are:
a) Japan
b) Canada
c) Italy
d) Germany
And when nobody notices that both B and C are correct (Italy capitulated in 1943),
it effectively makes the students dumber for having taken the class.
Meanwhile, Czechoslovakia was invaded in the year of... '38? '39? Who cares? As long as you know it was after the Anschluss and the Sudentenland, but before Poland, you've got the facts you need to understand how things developed.
And isn't that the point of dates, to put things in their proper sequence?
Or, in the case of students who
know better, it makes them horrified that the people in charge of teaching them higher order thinking seemingly
don't. This has been a recurring theme in my DD's life, by the way-- because she is a
veteran of such questions, in seemingly every subject.
I've written about that problem at length in the bad homework question thread before. Some of them are
seriously bad. Bad enough that they're kind of stupid, but worse still when
more sophisticated understanding makes them HARDER to get "right." And this is the reality for an awful lot of these test-bank questions.
DD knows that any exam like this is probably going to have between 2-5% questions like that one. She can come back to them at the end and attempt to read the tea leaves, but she knows that she can only get them right about 70% of the time no matter what she does, because-- well, she's effectively trying to get into the head of whoever was writing the darned thing.
Bravo, btw, Dude, for constructing a glorious example of this kind of thing in action.
Another favorite that I've mentioned before is:
T/F Mary Shelley wrote
Frankenstein for Lord Byron.
DD spent forty minutes on this ONE question once in high school. It enraged her that she KNEW all of this deep, deep background about Lake Geneva, the year-without-a-summer, etc. etc. and yet she couldn't figure out if she was supposed to go with "dumb" or "dumber" on that question, which constituted 10% of her quiz score.
