"Bob Brock" wrote in
:
wrote in message
oups.com...
Bob Brock wrote:
wrote in message
ups.com...
Mike Coslo wrote:
wrote in
ups.com:
Want to see a summary of the old study guides, and some sample
questions? I'll post them if you are interested.
Always am.
Here's a sample - lots more to come.
From the 1976 ARRL License Manual:
Study Question #31:
Well, I can see why those types of questions are no longer being
used. It's
more about who is giving the tests than it is about who is taking
it.
Every tried grading essay questions?
Yes - but you missed the point, Bob.
In 1976 the tests were all multiple-choice, same as today, except
that most of them were 5 choices rather than 4.
But the FCC-provided *study guides* were in essay format, as given
above. The exact Q&A were not publicly available - at least not
officially.
73 de Jim, N2EY
Yeah, but then there were all those "unofficial" question pools. The
same thing is done with the "General Contractors" exam here. For a
fee, you can know what questions are on the various exams and hence
have a study guide. Whether it's sanctioned or not, it would still
happen. I'll bet that the truth be told, there were some underground
copies of test questions available even back then. You know, if
everyone in the club came back an just wrote down the questions that
they remember, it wouldn't take long to cover over 90 percent of the
pool of questions.
Perhaps the FCC study guides were in essay form, but certainly the
little Ameco 1956 study guide I picked up at a hamfest had Q and A. It
had the answers to the Q and A also. Judging from the questions asked
there are two and only two possibilities:
A. Ameco was participating in fraud, in that the Q and A they
offered was not applicable to the test at the time.
B. The questions that they offered were not the exact questions on
an official test, but as there are only so many ways to ask the same
questions, the point was moot.
Giving the study guides in essay format and then testing multiple
choice gives the test writer a lot of leeway in how the questions are
worded. Some people get off on writing questions so that the test is
not so much on your knowledge of the subject as it is about your
ability to read carefully. The reason that it worked back then was
because the tests were administered by the FCC and had a lot more
oversight than todays test administrators do. The only real soulution
would be to provide an accepted pool of test questions that would be
approved to be on the tests. However, then we come back to how those
test pools would be available for a price after a while.
Q and A are also less subjective.
- 73 de Mike KB3EIA -