Time is an important consideration, but the major problem with essay and short-answer tests is objective assessment. If you have only one class of 30, this isn't too much of a problem. If you have four classes of 30, it becomes a serious problem, because even the same instructor drifts while assessing exams.

You could, of course, assess these exams much like ETS assesses writing: with multiple readers calibrated to a single rubric and set of texts, where second readers do not know what score the first reader has given, and any paper given two scores more than one apart must be evaluated by a third reader. However, this is very time and work intensive, and few faculty would be willing to do this.

And even if you are objective (for the sake of discussion), giving essay and short answer tests opens you to the charge of subjectivity, a charge that is difficult to fight on today's campuses, more difficult if you have a spineless chairman or worse, dean who is more interested in maintaining political ties than standing behind his faculty.

I have five classes, each with 240+ students. Do I give essay or short-answer tests? God no. I don't have the time to grade them; 48 hours after the final has been given, I have to turn in final grades. It's not feasible. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't, because it's a departmental final.

I'm merely pointing out that essay and short-answer exams have their own share of problems.

Thank you both for your comments.

“And the number of professional educators who will viciously attack you for making that truthful observation the moment you begin to identify demographics, are legion.”

I wasn't thinking of any demographics in particular while I wrote those, but I suppose you are right.

Stay tuned for “Wary Guerrillas” (the project formerly known as “Systems Administration for Phenotypes”), which will begin immediately after part V of this series. It looks at the demographics & implications of cooperation.. and comes to some interesting conclusions.

“The quality of a multiple choice test as an assessment tool depends entirely on the quality of the questions, and has nothing to do with the test format.”

Essay and multiple-choice exams are different creatures that require different conditions. Broad and vague questions can suffice for essays, because you are measuring a student's writing and thinking ability. However, questions have to be more carefully designed in multiple choice exams.

One way of thinking about the difference is if you want to spend more time in prep or more time in evaluation for a test. Essays save you prep time, while multiple-choice exams save you evaluation time.

““A” students learn to sacrifice understanding to breadth”

All too often and it is a terrible waste of talent, keeping the brightest operating at the lowest cognitive common denominator, except with greater accuracy over larger amounts of data.

” A professor will stand up with a lesson plan, often written years ago, and talk”

Ah the yellowed notes of the soon to be emiritus…LOL! True. Lectures are useful when used sparingly and with a cognitive objective in mind beyond conveying information, which usually means some student-teacher engagement beyond talk-listen-record.

“Multiple-choice exams are not effective”

No but they are cheap substitutes for a mass educational system that does not want to pay for real teaching or education vs. inculcating socialization norms.

“By essentially punishing the teacher for giving this sort of work “

The punishment is actually in the high student to teacher ratio that mitigates against all kinds of useful and productive interactions, except on an arbitrary basis. It's hard to get to know new 200 people well every year much less every semester

“Assigning individual work is full of dangers”

Depends on who is ready for it but feedback needs to follow

“Group work without accountability was some sort of prisoner's dilemma game, with one player being both unwilling and unable to meaningfully cooperate”

And the number of professional educators who will viciously attack you for making that truthful observation the moment you begin to identify demographics, are legion.

I agree with you:

“Essays encourages lazy teaching. By essentially punishing the teacher for giving this sort of work (it takes hours to grade these things), essays act as constant reinforcement against instructors who assign them. Standard essay tests punish the professors who use them. Additionally, the temptation to use a rubric (and sacrifice measured comprehension for something mindlessly easy to grade) becomes too great – and at that point, why not just use a multiple-choice exam?”