A Brief History of Multiple Choice Testing in Education

With the development of the College Entrance Examination Board in 1900 under the planning of presidents at Harvard and Columbia Universities, American educators were beginning to be persuaded by the need for an organization to set uniform curriculum standards and a uniform examination system (Ravitch, 2006). Although the College Board's standards were being upheld voluntarily by colleges that wanted to joining and, indeed, the system had remarkable influence on uplifting secondary education, not all parties were happy with the system, even as it administered its first tests to nearly one thousand applicants in June of 1901 (Ravitch, 2006).

Undoubtedly, one critical component to result from the creation of the College Board was unique bond that came to be shared between high school and college educators. However, as the Board gained respect and support from many, others still pursued the creation of their own tests. Group-administered intelligence testing utilizing multiple choice questions, for example, gained notoriety within the Army during World War I thanks to the work of Edward L. Thornton and other educational psychologists who claimed that the tests were a way of measuring what students were capable of learning (Ravitch, 2006). As College Board examinations faced criticism of being "obsolete", the Board enlisted a committee to design the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the first of which was administered in 1926. The SAT did away with the lengthy, time consuming, invalid, and unreliable traditional style of testing in essay format (Ravitch, 2006).

With the rapid enlistment of millions of young men looming over the horizon following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the College Board decided to speed up the process by dropping their written tests and using multiple choice achievement tests and the SAT. This event marked the end of grading essays and, instead, using a machine to grade as well as the shift in the College Board to being a means of assessing student abilities (Ravitch, 2006).

By the 1960s, multiple-choice testing was facing considerable challenges and criticism, mostly due to critics stating that the tests were not instruments to improve education. Evidence started growing which stated that learning was a complex process not limited to a routine selection of small components (Black, 1998). As a response, the ACT and SAT were redesigned in 1989, largely to enhance emphasis on conceptual and abstract thinking (Black, 1998). Today, although it is believed to possess many faults, multiple-choice testing methods are still widely used do to their ability to meet the needs of ease, cost, and speed of testing (Black, 1998).

Sources:

Black, P.J. (1998). Testing: Friend or Foe? New York: Routledge, Inc.

Ravitch, D. (2006). The fall of standard-bearers. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved May 26, 2009 from http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i27/27b04401.htm