The Issue of Essay or Multiple-Choice Tests

“Can Essay Tests Make the Grade” (Dec. 31) gets at the heart of the problems involved: Objective tests do not ask the kinds of questions students will encounter in life, and essay tests suffer from problems involving accuracy and subjectivity.

School testing is primarily political, used to push one agenda or another, support one or another set of budget allocations and, as such, is largely unconcerned with the issue of whether a test is valid or reliable. Standardized test content is largely arbitrary, determined by a group of people who are unfamiliar with what students have been studying in the classroom. Students, on a given day, will perform well or poorly on a test based as much on their health, emotional attitude and interest as on their knowledge of the material.

Tests provide limited, hit or miss demonstrations of a mere fragment of what students know. Therefore, test results should not be used to shape public opinion, to label students or to determine the quality of a particular teacher or school. Instead, test results should be used to help the student recognize what areas of weakness exist, what material needs to be studied and what avenues might be profitably explored. A better tool for evaluating student achievement would involve long-term, multi-skill performance measures like portfolios and job evaluations.

GARY BARTON

Cypress

* Critics of essay assessment argue, essentially, that it’s just not cost-effective to have students write about what they know because it will cost money to read and assess the resultant papers. In addition, the elimination of multiple-choice testing diminishes the importance of the beloved concept of compe- tition--among students, schools, communities--upon which much of the business world is based. The inevitable concerns about “fairness” and “objectivity” are raised.

Sadly, a vital and revealing form of assessment is in danger of being cast aside simply because it can’t be had cheaply and quickly. Aside from the fact that this issue is taken out of a larger socioeconomic and political context, where is the concern about quality?

It seems to me that if we are truly committed to educating our children for democracy, then we need to stop applying the criteria of capitalism when judging public education. There has long been a dichotomy between educating for the job market and educating for life. Educating for democracy entails offering students opportunities to ask relevant questions, engage in critical analyses of information, collaborate, argue, make decisions and evaluate consequences.

JERE MENDELSOHN

Glendale