A professor at the University of Mississippi, Tamar Goulet’s biology class sizes range from 40 to 125 students, so grading exams can be time-consuming. The university offers bubble sheets, but they are designed for multiple-choice items and cannot evaluate fill-in-the-blank responses. To make matters worse, Goulet feels that multiple-choice exams may not accurately assess knowledge of the material she teaches.
“Without knowing the right answer, a student can arrive at it by chance or by eliminating options they know are incorrect,” she pointed out. “Knowing the right word to enter requires the student to know the material.”