Why does anyone think multiple choice assessments are automatically bad for maths assessment? I don't agree, though of course there can be bad ones. There are things they can't test, but that shouldn't be a concern if you think your child has mastery, surely? In English etc. I get the over-thinking trap, though even there I'm not as convinced as some... But in maths?
IMO, the problems with multiple choice assessments are as follows
1.
Points are allotted based solely on the answer chosen. Students hand in scannable forms or slick SUBMIT, making it unlikely (or impossible) that the teacher will look at the student's work and assess her strengths and weaknesses. As a result, the teacher has no way of knowing if a student got an answer wrong because he made a minor mistake or if she really had no idea how to approach the problem and just guessed.
2.
Multiple choice (MC) exams test superficial knowledge. This is because they provide a lot of questions that have to be answered quickly (e.g.
the SAT mathematics test gives 70 minutes to answer 54 questions). A test designed this way clearly isn't examining a student's ability to think carefully and put ideas together in more than a superficial way.
Compare with
this GCE exam from the UK: 8 questions, 90 minutes.
BTW, if you think the SAT questions are a joke, check out
the California high school exit exam. Look at question 41!
True, they could easily turn that GCE paper into a multiple choice exam with only 8 answer bubbles, but then a student would lose 1/8 of all possible points if he made a minor sign mistake at the end a problem --- and a student who doesn't really understand all the maths could narrow the answers down to two possibilities and guess correctly.
3.
Multiple choice tests use tricky wording as a poor substitute for questions like the ones in the GCE exam above. This is a serious problem in the humanities, but it affects maths and science exams as well. It can be used to cut both ways: questions can be written in a way that makes an answer guessable (see question 42 in the California exam), and questions can be written in a way that tries to trick the student (common on the SAT).
You can argue that point 3 makes a bad MC exam, but I would argue that the NCLB/everyone-must-go-to-college environment in the US makes it virtually impossible to write a MC exam that doesn't suffer from the first problem (writing to help students guess answers: OMG!! They all have to pass!!!
). And the nature of the MC format is such that using tricky wording is an
unavoidable outcome on exams like the SAT. This particular problem actually goes a bit deeper than this, but I'll stop here.
All of these attributes contribute to teaching students that mathematics is all about clever wording and getting answers quickly. It doesn't teach them how to think slowly and carefully. It also rewards ONLY students who think quickly and punishes students who can get original answers, but not quickly.
