The "necessary" evil?

For the last five years or so, I have thought a lot about assessment, and even more about evaluation in my classes. When I first taught my non-AP statistics course 10 years ago, I decided to not use tests or quizzes. I have often tried to make use of alternative assessments such as projects, portfolios, and take-home problem sets. My primary goal has been to create assessments for my students that are closer to something that they might actually do outside of academia. Tests and quizzes as far as I can tell are artifices almost exclusively in the domain of academia.

And yet, here I am getting my students ready for a major exam. Granted, they have eight more months to prepare for the AP Statistics exam, but in a couple weeks, I will give an in-class, timed test. What’s more, it will have 10 multiple-choice questions as part of the test.

I have not given a standard multiple-choice test in 15 years. I long ago swore them off. To me, they are assessments that in no way advantage a student and don’t even help a teacher evaluate a student’s mastery of a concept or skill. Did they get the answer right by luck? Did they get it wrong because they mis-read the question? Did they drop a negative sign in solving an equation and end up with one of the incorrect answers?

As I have told my students on numerous occasions, on a multiple-choice question, one can solve a problem and do 95% of the work correctly, but get no credit. It’s all-or-nothing.

Yes, it will make scoring those problems very easy for me. But my job as a teacher is not to make my job easy. My job is to provide my students with the best learning opportunities I can. Tests, in my mind, are very low on the totem pole of learning opportunities. Multiple-choice tests barely even qualify as a learning opportunity. Learning opportunities worth doing are projects, activities, rich tasks, and presentations. Evaluating a student’s work on a project gives so much more insight into what a student knows and what they can do.

I have avoided AP classes because I do not want to teach to a test. I do not want to rush through material because the College Board has decided that the course must contain certain topics. I prefer to dive deep into a problem and to provide my students the time to fully understand the concepts. My regular statistics students may have only learned half the number of statistics topics as an AP student. But on the material that they did cover, I daresay that their learning went deeper and that they understood better how to properly use the statistical tools. And I bet they also enjoyed the class more.