Macau Matters | Academic assessment stupidities

Richard Whitfield

Mostly for fun and to “keep my hand in” I teach a few undergraduate courses each year at a local university. I have recently been “asked” to use faculty guidelines that say that ½ of my examination should be multiple choice questions to revise my proposed examination for the current course I am teaching. I find this incredibly stupid and insulting and so this article will be a bit of a rant on this general topic.

Education, including university, is largely about instilling knowledge, skills and attitudes. Historically, the university emphasis has been on knowledge transmission – the typical image of a professor pouring book knowledge into the skulls of students and having them parrot it back in examinations. The Internet – Wikipedia and Google – have certainly made this view obsolete and is shifting the emphasis much more towards university as a collaboration between staff and students to pass on skills and attitudes with knowledge being pervasively available.

This new situation necessitates a fundamental rethinking of student assessment. The traditional examination to test a student’s recall about a subject has very little value – continuous monitoring of student work and feedback regarding their skills/competency and attitudes becomes primary. I see little value in the typical recall based multiple choice question in the future of education, and not much value in traditional examinations. However, they certainly have a place where you need you need a lot of drill and practice to develop skills, such as when learning a language – a totally different situation.

Multiple choice, gap fill and similar test questions are also problematic because they are tedious and difficult to properly design – great care must be taken with the wording of the question and the answers to eliminate bias and to ensure that common misconceptions are included (as well as correct and incorrect answers). Then they should be validation tested – shown to many students and checked to see that they actually work as expected. This is often not feasible and is too much effort for “once only” use in an examination. Even in reusable formative assessment situations they are still problematic because a great deal of effort must be put into preparing remedial information to correct all possible misconceptions about topics. Mostly, it is just much easier to talk to students asking them questions and directly addressing their misconceptions and the gaps in their knowledge.

In most countries, you need to be certified (and to have completed extensive university level studies) to be a kindergarten, primary or secondary school teacher, but unfortunately this is rarely a requirement for being a university professor. From personal experience, I know that proficiency in a subject’s content is very poor preparation for teaching it. After several initial disasters, I put a lot of man-hours and effort into being taught how to teach; much more than most of my academic colleagues. Luckily, the universities where I initially taught recognized this problem and made considerable resources available so that their academic staff could learn how to teach. Very unfortunately, universities in Macau do not seem to recognize this issue and provide minimal support for their academic staff in this area.

To me, the examination guidelines I just received clearly demonstrate an old-style “knowledge stuffing” approach to university learning and teaching and a total lack of understanding of good student assessment. It is a band-aid to cover up the poor teaching knowledge, skills and attitudes of the academic staff. If local universities want to become world class they must put a great deal of effort and resources into teaching their academic staff how to teach, and misguided advice on what should be in examinations does not address this core issue.