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Examination methods
Page 148
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From time to time in the feature written by your esteemed contributor George Wilmot there are references to transport examinations and their conduct and it seems that various matters to which your contributor refers are mainly on the assumption that examinations of the future will always be of the type in which candidates are given a list of questions and required to answer a selection in a given time in their own words.
As a former examiner to the Institute of Transport and the Royal Society of Arts, I believe the time has come for an almost complete changeover in transport examination method to what some call "examination by computerbut what is really electronic reading of examination scripts and calculation of data from them. In this system an examination paper consists of a number of questions showing against each multiple-choice answers. The candidate is required to mark in pencil one answer only of his choice against each question. The instrument then "reads" these marks and transfers the answers to magnetic tape from which all sorts of data can be calculated and the results printed out: individual performance, trends, statistics, etc. The system completely refutes any suggestion of sadistic treatment by human examiners and is considerably cheaper to operate than by human means. The Kenya Ministry of Education, for example, recently ran 510,000 answer sheets from a schools examination through a Britishmade ICL electronic reader in about SO hours. The year before it had taken 500 teachers the same time to mark 450.000 scripts.
Transport subjects are particularly suitable for electronic mark-reading. Most questions require a definite answer: the candidate either knows or he doesn't and his mark on the answer sheet denotes exactly whether he does or he doesn't. Even such woolly subjects as economics can be given clarity in their application to transport operation and multiple-choice answers devised.
The only objection I have heard to the mark-sensing examination method is that. if a candidate is weak in a subject,
the multiple-choice answers set his mind on the right road and he may well give his mark to the correct answer by suggestion. I think this is much preferable to the present written-answer system in which an examinee, knowing a subject well, may misread a question and answer it entirely wrongly. It is heartbreaking for an examiner to find that a candidate, having produced an otherwise brilliant paper, has completely misread just one question and lost a great chunk of marks owing to a completely inaccurate answer.
I wonder which will be the first transport examining body to "go modernand introduce the indubitably fair electronic system of examining? Further, I wonder when these bodies will get together and, by establishing a joint examinations board, economize in examination costs and effort? After all, their syllabuses are largely copy-cat.
But, of course, the great opportunity for the electronic system will come when the thousands of examinations are held for the statutory transport managers' certificate.
R. J. EATON, MinstT. MinsITA, AM B I M, Thorpe Bay, Essex.