"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:v8ykd.323917$wV.252939@attbi_s54...
[...]
Everyone hates 'em -- but no one has come up with a viable alternative for
measuring what someone has learned.

There are tests, and then there are tests. No is suggesting that all tests
are useless. But emphasizing education to the point of focusing only on
what it takes to pass a standardized multiple-choice exam fails the student.

Think about aviation. You (ought to) know as well as anyone else that
there's studying for the written exams, and then there's really knowing how
to fly an airplane. I wouldn't do away with the written exam, but to think
that a person taught strictly to pass the written exam would make a good
pilot is silly.

Testing is actually quite a reasonably well-studied science. There's a
whole art to creating a proper multiple choice exam, and most people
understand that to really test non-rote skills, multiple-choice exams don't
do as well as a number of other testing methods.

Pete