[pianotech] Restoring Museum Pianos

Susan Kline skline at peak.org
Wed Jan 5 13:58:26 MST 2011


On 1/5/2011 10:14 AM, Ron Nossaman wrote:
> That's why I never liked multiple choice tests. My answer never was on 
> the list. <G> 
That happened to me a lot. <GRIN> I figured out how to reverse-engineer 
the tests. They were pretty simple-minded, the people who put those 
things together back in the 1950's and 1960's. They also seemed to think 
that they were invisible, that no one saw their hammy hands behind the 
architecture of the problems and answers.

Usually the pattern was something like, "put in one really far-out 
answer, which is wrong. Then have two answers close together, and one of 
these is right. Make one more answer, like the two ones close to each 
other, but put it a little further away." Maybe for one question in a 
hundred the similar but more distant answer was right, but really it did 
just fine to choose one of the two which were close together. It was 
also a very fast way to get through it all, so there were no blanks. It 
wasn't hard work, either, and it felt good to address the exam with 
aggression <CRUNCH! So THERE!> <and one looked so innocent hunched over 
the exam sheet with one's two freshly sharpened #2 pencils.> Then I 
could use the extra time left over actually working out the more 
accessible problems, skipping around doing the least time-consuming 
first. The pencil marks for the machine-grading erased if I needed to 
change an answer.

(Ah, the glow of nostalgia ... something which I actually could do well, 
amidst so many things I was bad at ...)

Susan Kline
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