Quotes

“Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.” – Charlotte Mason

"To educate man is the art of arts, for he is the most complex and mysterious of all creatures." - Gregory the Theologian

Sunday, September 2, 2012

The Tyranny of Testing

"Multiple choice tests penalize the deep student, dampen creativity, foster intellectual dishonesty, and undermine the very foundations of education"

"It is not the presence of defective questions that makes multiple-choice tests bad. Such questions merely make them worse. Even if all the questions were impeccable, the deep student would see more in a question than his more superficial competitors would ever dream was in it, and would expend more time and mental energy than they in answering it. That is the way his mind works. That is, indeed, his special merit. But the multiple-choice tests are concerned solely with the candidates choice of answer, and not with the reasons for his choice. Thus they ignore that elusive yet crucial thing we call quality."