Multiple choice questions are useful for assessing subject matter knowledge as well as certain verbal and quantitative reasoning skills. They also usually provide highly reliable scores per hour of testing time and they are relatively inexpensive to construct, administer, and score. Hence, they will continue to have an important role in college admissions and higher education assessment, particularly when the purpose of the testing program is to provide individual level scores.

Unfortunately, multiple choice tests are just not up to the task of measuring some of the other important skills that colleges strive to develop in their students. And it is those skills that constitute CLA’s focus and thereby its reliance on open-ended measures.

The CLA uses essay type questions to assess certain cognitive abilities that cannot be tested or tested well with multiple choice items. These skills include (but are not limited to) identifying issues and information in documents that are and are not relevant to a problem, marshalling and organizing information, making a persuasive argument or an objective analysis about some issue, and presenting clear and well thought out recommendations for a course of action and explaining the basis and rationale for these recommendations (such as identifying and discussing the related supporting and contradictory evidence). For example, a CLA task might ask a student to (1) describe some of the problems that might arise if a given policy was implemented and (2) explain why some of these problems are more likely to occur than others (and which would be the most serious and why). This is a very different skill than simply recognizing from a list of problems the one that is most likely to happen.

While it is possible to take a complex task and break it down into constituent pieces--which is often done to meet the demands of the multiple choice format--performing well on the separate pieces is not the same as performing well on the original task. This is particularly true if the pieces have been simplified so the answer needs only to be selected rather than created.

Tests serve as a cue to instructors, students, educational institutions and even the public regarding what is valued, and by omission what is not valued in our society. The multiple choice test format has been adopted as the preferred testing format in most classrooms (high school and college) because of the ease of scoring and clarity of “correct” and “incorrect” responses. This means that present day education does not often encourage the practice of or provide the necessary feedback on written responses outside of specific writing courses such as creative writing or composition. As such, students have developed a notion that writing is only important in English courses and English fields or professions. They no longer understand the importance of writing in physics, or biology for example.

This has led some colleges and universities to mandate that a certain number of courses in every field be designated as “Writing Intensive.” Students are then required to complete a minimum number of writing intensive credits to guarantee that students will receive an opportunity to practice crafting written responses in fields outside of the English department. Though some institutions are attempting to address the issue of training for analytical writing in a variety of contexts, there are two remaining problems. First, there is no check to ensure that writing intensive courses are meeting the goal of teaching the analytical writing skills. Second, the unfortunate result of a writing intensive mandate for some classes is that students may feel that writing in courses that are not designated as writing intensive is unfair because no writing credit is earned. This creates additional social pressure on instructors to do away with written responses in their courses unless designated to do so by their institution. The message inferred by the students and others may be that analytical writing is not a fundamental part of learning and performance in every subject and every class. Evaluating schools on the basis of analytical writing is a major start to changing that message.