While taking exams of Engineering/Technical students, which method will be suitable? Either Descriptive Quiestions or Multi Choice questions?
You have to adopt both method to develop students understanding as well as you should create industrial oriented different hands-on program to meet industrial demand.
One interesting and effective testing strategy is to give a multiple choice question and follow with a text question asking the student to justify or describe the process of selecting their answer to the preceding multiple choice question. This provides good insight into why students get the wrong answer and can suggest opportunities for re-teaching and/or remediation.
A variation on this is provide choices that are all "correct" but different and have students justify their selection in the text question. This often produces really interesting and thoughtful answers.
The point made by Valerie Taylor seems to be interesting. As of now such question are being tried out in very competitive exams like GATE, CAT, IIT-JEE among others. If that is incorporated in to general engineering exams it would definitely drive students towards understanding concepts rather than memorizing the contents.
A good method will be a combination of both - multiple choice questions as well as small open ended questions to test the problem solving abilities of engineering students.
- Badges
- Science method
- Similar topics
- Teaching