Multiple choice and true false questions were fairly common in my undergraduate experience, particularly in first year courses. Often they were Scantron forms for maximum laziness.
STEM at large public schools is almost exclusively 100+ person classes with maybe 2 TAs, who are more interested in their research than grading exams. We end up with easy to grade exams. I went to a similarly, if not more, prestigious public school and cs exams were usually around 20 multiple choice and 2 or so extended response.
One of my colleagues uses multiple choice exams for his classes (online and in-person) but he gives them a ton of questions. Something like 90 for a 2hr test. His theory was that, sure, you could look up the answers to a few questions, but if you're doing that for every question you'll run out of time.
Your colleague would be wrong. I've passed multiple exams this way (they allowed Internet access because the prof thought the same way).
You can very likely answer around 1/4th of the questions immediately with less than passive participation in the course, so for the remaining 60 questions you'll get two minutes per question, which is completely manageable if you type and read fast enough.
Multiple choice questions are universally terrible and lazy, and should not be more than a small part of the exam mostly meant to provide easy points.
Good point. I was also thinking that I never saw a scantron while studying CS at two different American R1 research universities, but the CS departments were small with at most 25 people in a classroom. Peeking at some other universities now, it looks like some required undergrad CS classes have 500-1,000 seats. That's crazy, and clearly demands a different approach.
True/False questions happened sometimes in my experience, but not in this quantity (20). I wouldn't say it's lazy. The questions can be clever and writing them, such that the answer isn't debatable and doesn't depend on a bunch of assumptions, is pretty hard.
Lazy and terrible is where you have multiple choice questions for which 3/4 of the answers are throwaway nonsense, or the answers are numerical values that are definitively correct or incorrect but are trivia rather than anything conceptual.
Enrolment at my uni is 70k. There is no real problem with long form questions on the test, even for first year classes. I was also a TA. You can have more correctors, and I'd assume a quantum computing class won't even have too many students.
Do you honestly believe UT spends money on its sports? You realize their football team generates BILLIONS a year in sales and TV rights? Football isn’t why UT is overcrowded lol
In my country, yes. In fact because the True/False were there, or to circle the correct answer, I was in this way given a hint of what the correct answer is. Had I needed to think of it, I wouldn't have managed to graduate high school.
Full disclose, I graduated with something close to a D, but in actuality we are graded from 2(F) to 6(A) and my HS diploma says 3.97. And it is largely fictitious, in reality I was closer to 3 and less.
