Just the other day I spent a few minutes talking with my niece– a college senior– while she took a multiple choice test in an online interim Political Science course. One tiny part of my brain was concerned with ethics– is this cheating?– but the teacher in me was more concerned with trying to help her ‘talk out’ the answers. I was never good at these tests and so I was not always sure of the answers myself, even though I am very familiar with the subject.

Many questions were designed, it seemed, to fool you into going in one direction when the answer lay in another. Perhaps the purpose is to get students to to think twice before they…

If you took a picture of a classroom at the time of the War of 1812, a professor once pointed out to me, it would look roughly the same as a classroom today: teacher in front, a blackboard, students in chairs. Maybe our classrooms have white boards, or some sort of electronic board; perhaps there’s a computer on the podium and a screen that drops down. In any case, the modern classroom has changed far less than, say, transportation over the last two centuries.

Then as now we had grades, yet we know that grades are not good ways to guide learning. Most grades– even if derived from multiple choice testing– are unreliable. Still we continue to have…