BARZUN ON TESTING STUDENTS
Student
Multiple-choice questions test nothing but passive-recognition knowledge, not active usable knowledge.
Knowing something means the power to summon up facts and their significance in the right relations. Mechanical testing does not foster this power. It is one thing to pick out Valley Forge, not Dobbs Ferry or Little Rock, as the place where George Washington made his winter quarters; it is another, first, to think of Valley Forge and then to say why he chose it rather than Philadelphia, where it was warmer.
In subjects that require something other than information—the development of skill, as in reading, writing and mathematics—straining toward a plausible choice is not instructional. Nobody ever learned to write better by filling in blanks with proffered verbs and adjectives. To write is to fill a totally blank sheet with words of your own.
Instead of forcing—and coaching—young minds in form-filling exercises, telling them "choose and take a chance," schools would be well advised to return to Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Tell us what you know."
