[This is a guest post by Derek Bruff, an assistant director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, where he is also a senior lecturer in Mathematics. His book, Teaching with Classroom ...

Meandering into the lecture hall, you take note of the atmosphere. The air is still. But for the faint sounds of shuffling pages, trackpad clicks, and anxiety-laced whispering, the room is silent. You ...

Like many professors, I tend to disparage multiple-choice tests. They measure a narrow test-taking skill that has little to do with “real life.” They’re about memorizing facts rather than dealing with ...

Ideally, multiple-choice exams would be random, without patterns of right or wrong answers. However, all tests are written by humans, and human nature makes it impossible for any test to be truly ...

Boys perform better than girls in tests made up of multiple-choice questions. Multiple-choice questions are considered objective and easy to mark. But my research shows they give an advantage to males ...

Multiple-choice questions don’t belong in college. They’re often ineffective as a teaching tool, they’re easy for students to cheat, and they can exacerbate test anxiety. Yet more professors seem to ...