This is the reason that I refused to use MC questions:
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.
Inherently, there IS no way to entirely eliminate this particular problem, which is fairly severe in STEM.
It's so binary/outcome-based that the process is (mostly) ignored. That
is the format.
I'll add to Val's critique that MC is the format that allows students to earn credit via "guess-and-check" rather than understanding-- and a student who has poor computational accuracy may well score about as well as a speedy guess-and-checker. I think that those two hypothetical students should NOT be earning the same grade on an assessment of their understanding of that material.
I love short-answer. I hate MC.
While the former cannot be readily autograded the way that the latter can, they ARE fairly quick to grade. I managed to do it routinely for 200-300 students a semester, and while I'm quick, I don't think that I'm
that much faster at grading or constructing assessments than most faculty.
Anyway. MC and Common Core seem to be the very worst sort of mismatch imaginable-- after all, the ideals behind CC indicate an emphasis on
process and a move AWAY from "accuracy" in that process...
meaning that fundamentally, there is a lack of alignment with the assessments if they are multiple choice. {sigh}
IMO, even
good MC questions are mostly not intended with students in mind, but with high THROUGHPUT in mind.
