Like the majority of large enrollment freshman biology courses, the one I will be involved in teaching is assessed entirely by MCQs. This may be because anyone who has to had to read 300 freshman biology essays is already dead, and therefore unable to write any more essay questions. However, this also means that the only way that I can assess any of the learning objectives I have been carefully assembling (with my teaching buddy and FIRST IV team member, who will take a parallel lecture section) is to ask for a choice between (a)-through-(e). While I believe that MCQs can be profound and rich and fantastically high level, it turns out I just don't have the skills required to write them that way. Let me elaborate:
a) To write good 'distractors' I need to have a good idea of what students' misconceptions are likely to be. I don't. I've never taught freshpeople before, and the published information I could find on this was only partly helpful.
b) There are some types of objectives that we just can't find a way to assess by MCQ: For instance, you can kiss goodbye to objectives that contain verbs like explain, construct, model, diagram, interpret, conclude, criticize and countless more.
c) With no ability to show working, even calculate objectives are nightmares to write, because calculators are banned.
d) Sometimes there just don't seem to be four additional plausible-sounding alternatives to the right answer. Most of the time there is one, or maybe two.
e) Often, it seems like some questions are only harder because they require a higher level of reading comprehension (e.g. noticing the importance of certain words to sentence meaning, like because, always, might, only, therefore, required and so forth) which is obviously very important, but isn't the only learning objective I want to assess.
Ack.
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