Comment by fungiblecog
6 years ago
But they're not being asked to produce a justifiable answer. This is multiple choice with only 1 'correct' answer.
The only way to really test comprehension is through essay questions but then the complaints on subjectivity are raised and we're back at standardised multiple choice
Britain manages to set questions for the exams taken at ages 16, (17) and 18 with essay-type questions, for most questions of all subjects.
There's a complete paper for GCSE (at 16) English here. Choose the June 2017 one, as the November one has the source material omitted due to copyright.
https://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/gcse/english-languag...
You can skip to the last few pages of the mark scheme to get the idea of how the long-form answers are marked. "Varied and inventive use of structural features, Writing is compelling, incorporating a range of convincing and complex ideas, Fluently linked paragraphs with seamlessly integrated discourse markers"
Likewise the AP English Literature exam in the US features graded essays. https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap18-frq-english-lite...
> omitted due to copyright
It is actually omitted due to testcenter policy, to enable reuse. You cannot reuse an exam with its answer key published.
Are you sure about that? "Paper 1: Insert (Modified A4 18pt) November 2017" quite clearly states: "The source cannot be reproduced here due to third party copyright restrictions."
I highly doubt this. I had access to basically all past papers (questions and answers) for my GCSE and A levels. The exam board cannot assume students don't have this. (That said, it was not hard to spot patterns in the questions they asked over time. English was generally reasonably different, but the electronics papers would just copy and paste questions from one year to the next and change some of the numbers).
yeah, but there's few things as insufferable (well ok, reading YouTube comments or something) as reading someone's writing who's learnt to write according to standardised essay marking procedures...
They are given a set of answers and are trying to find the most justifiable among them (note that the questions pretty much all have most likely or some other variant of the phrase in them). The student is tasked with evaluating these interpretations of the poem and picking the one which is most justified, which at least required some understanding of the poem and literary terms.
For example,
The poet includes these lines most likely to suggest that the speaker
—F does not wish to be pushed on a swing
-G wants to deal with the situation alone
-H does not often receive help from others
-J is not physically strong
J is the most obviously wrong, as it is at best irrelevant to the lines in question. F is reasonable if you accept the lines as literal, but it's fairly obviously metaphorical (punning off of the phrase 'mood swing'). H seems relevant in that the passage is about receiving help from others, but it's clearly commenting on how she would react to help, not about the likelyhood of receiving it. J seems the most reasonable: the passage is saying she would push back against attempt to cheer her up, and so concluding she would like to be left alone in this mood is a reasonable interpretation.
Note that the final answer doesn't have to be the one the person taking the test would, it just has to be the most justified and reasonable of the one presented. In terms of evaluating skill at interpreting writing and in terms of evaluating interpretations of this writing, this seems a reasonable approach. Essay questions may be better, and indeed the push to multiple choice is almost certainly to reduce the cost of marking as opposed to any other concerns, but these don't seem like terribly designed multiple choice questions.