Whereas earlier peoples had manufactured their pottery by hand,adding eye-catching designs and glazes, the Uruk craftsmen mostlyproduced pottery on the newly invented wheel, rarely adding anyadornments. Quantity, now possible with a type of mass production,seems to have taken priority over quality in ceramic manufacture.
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Morgan, Robert R. “Opinion | Hard-Pressed Teachers Don’t Have a Choice on Multiple Choice.” The New York Times, October 22, 1988, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/22/opinion/l-hard-pressed-teachers-don-t-have-a-choice-on-multiple-choice-563988.html.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150525091818/https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/22/opinion/l-hard-pressed-teachers-don-t-have-a-choice-on-multiple-choice-563988.html. Internet Archive.
Example of a teacher pressed into multiple-choice tests for evaluation for time constraints on grading.
He falls prey to the teacher's guilt of feeling they need to grade every single essay written. This may be possible at the higher paid levels of university teaching with incredibly low student to teacher ratios, but not at the mass production level of public education.
While we'd like to have education match the mass production assembly lines of the industrial revolution, this is sadly nowhere near the case with current technology. Why fall prey to the logical trap?
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arguments in favor of these ''objective'' tests: They are easy to grade; uniformity and unmistakable answers imply fairness; one can compare performance over time and gauge the results of programs; the validity of questions is statistically tested and the performance of students is followed up through later years.
Some of the benefits of multiple-choice tests.
Barzun misses the fact that these are not just easy for teachers to grade, but they're easier for mass grading by machines in a century dominated by standardization of knowledge in a world dominated by standardized mechanization for a mass-production oriented society.
Cross reference educational reforms of Eliot following the rise of Taylorism.
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