[Updated, thanks - T.]

When will mathematics be viewed as it should: a very cognitively nourishing spectrum of opportunities and a way to overcome many life puzzles? This cannot be the view if one is bound by perhaps faulty imaginations of another party in the name of the examiner. Mathematics should be a liberating rather than an enslaving and thought restricting discipline. It should be a bedrock of scientific disciplines as well as arts by setting the mind free to manipulate ideas and prove results. This encourages innovation and adventure and is a recipe for industrial revolution in any economy.

Whereas options may crop up in life, certainly not in all instances and when they do, first the liberal mind is the best to get the most appropriate option. Assessment should therefore encourage independence of thought in consideration of other people’s findings and not bind the learner in the perhaps shallow confines of the one or few persons’ setting the questions and devising the possible options. It should spark or rather elicit a rich response or opinion of the learner allowing him/her to believe in oneself and defend one’s stand point.

Multiple choice tests should rarely be used in summative evaluation unless in a very minimal extent.

Your “source-of-sound” question, and especially what you call the correct answer, sounds a bit fishy to me.

You say every source of sound is a net emitter of sound.

Take some big machine (like a computer, say), that eats a LOT of energy (that is, work is performed on it), and produces a TINY little bit of sound. Such a machine would be emitting sound, but will be a net absorber of energy. So not all sound emitters are ‘net’ emitters of energy.

In fact, THE quintessential emitter of sound — a speaker — typically has about 1% efficiency. That is, 99% of electrical power input gets converted to heat. Now if you carefully heat-insulate the speaker, the speaker would be a very good net absorber of energy.

Anyway, I think one should carefully define what “a source of sound” means, before asking/answering this question.

The source of every sound is something that is
A) undergoing simple harmonic motion.
B) accelerating.
C) a net emitter of energy.
D) moving.
E) vibrating.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080809103803AApEWeK
Apparently, fewer than 20% of “guessers” pick the ONLY correct choice (C) because most or all wrong answers may look better, or more “plausible” at first.

Questions of that quality being so rare, it’s still safe to say that multiple-choice exams are a disgrace (except, possibly, in quick self-evaluations).

Also, let’s not forget that exams graded by a teacher are a rare opportunity for students to assert themselves in a creative sense. That opportunity is denied to them if they are only asked to check boxes…

The Big Picture: Education consists in passing civilization and knowledge from one generation to the next. Ultimately, some students ought to be able to write better questions than their elders, or else the whole exercise is pointless and/or doomed… Checking boxes in front of existing questions does not help at all in that process.

http://www.blork.org/blorkblog/2008/03/31/how-to-disable-snap-shots-on-blogs/

[Snap shots has been disabled for about a month or so here. If others are still finding it activated, please notify me. -T.]