Kevin+F’s+OpEd+Article

Who invented the multiple-choice test? I seriously want to know so I can find this him/her and shove an AP-style U.S. History test in his/her face. Then if he/she fails to score a perfect 100% on the test, I will force them to take it again until they succeed at getting a perfect score. I’ll show them the pain that I feel taking one of these tests. Then they will hopefully realize the mistake they made. All of us in AMEX know what multiple-choice tests are like. They suck.

Remember those days back in the first grade when the teacher would give us the math benchmark exam? Well here’s what would happen in those days: Teacher: “Friday, October 23 will be the day of our benchmark class.” Class: “Awwwww.” Teacher: “Don’t worry. It will be easy for all of you guys because it’s all multiple-choice.” Class: “YAYYYY!!!!” Ah yes, the good old days where the entire class would cheer because we could score 100% on the test even though we don’t know crap. Multiple-choice tests barely show what we know at all. They show that we can bubble in, circle, or write a letter on paper. Not much else. If you’re going to test someone on what they have learned in Geometry, Algebra, Biology, Chemistry, etc., just give them a free-response test like an essay or a list of calculations. Don’t just give us a bunch of bubbles that say A, B, C, D, or E on them.

Now we are in high school; multiple-choice tests still plague our classes, but this time, they act as missiles just waiting to shoot down our grades whether we know the material or not. The tests in APUSH are probably the best example of this. We study the crap out of __The American Pageant__ since Mr. Geib tells us that it is a reading comprehension test on chapters 23-27. By the time we get to the test, studying doesn’t matter. We still fail. We have some extremely smart people in our class who score eights and nines on every essay and still end up with a B in the class all because of the multiple-choice tests. And the multiple-multiples? Those just need to go. All they do is take the grade we score on the regular multiple-choice questions and make it worse. I can’t believe the College Board would even consider making AP students from across the country take such a test. Just stick with the essays. They really show what we know. It’s no wonder the pass rate in so many states is so low. Multiple-choice tests are there to screw them over. In AP English, AP U.S. History, AP Physics, and AP Calculus BC, there are always multiple-choice questions, and even if we know how to nail the free-response part of the test, we still get a 4 on the test overall because we failed the multiple-choice section. That is just unfair. If we show what we know by scoring 100% on the free-response questions, we should get a 5 no matter what the score is on the multiple-choice part of the test.

Mr. Geib is right. We should just replace all multiple-choice tests with essays. Not only are they better test because we actually use what we study, but they are just easier overall. Multiple-choice tests suck!