https://blog.inroads.acm.org/2013/01/can-a-b-c-d-assess-understanding/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=can-a-b-c-d-assess-understanding Paving the Way Toward Excellence in Computing Education Sun, 01 Mar 2015 09:41:10 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.34 https://blog.inroads.acm.org/2013/01/can-a-b-c-d-assess-understanding/#comment-9 Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:59:39 +0000 http://inroads.acm.org/blog/?p=74#comment-9 I’m not a fan of multiple choice exams either, and up until last year I would have said that there was no place for them in the computing curriculum. Then I worked with a graduate student from Northwestern on a project involving peer instruction. In her project the students answered multiple-choice questions about some code (Python, although it could have been any programming language), discussed the question among themselves, and then answered the question again. The questions were very carefully constructed to contain both the correct answer and answers that would arise from various misunderstandings of the code. The students learned so much from those exercises! Of course, it wasn’t just the questions that enabled the learning, but also the discussion between the students. So I think that there is a place for multiple-choice questions, although I don’t necessarily think that traditional assessments are that place.

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