>Please, god, tell me that you were a TA in a public school as part of
>some sort of externship or something. I know that it isn't entirely
>uncommon, but whenever I hear of genuine for-real collegiate level
>courses using multiple-choice scantron-style tests I just want to weep
>for the state of higher education.

The intro-level classes with 150 students often use scantrons for the exams, because when you're teaching three sections of that plus two classes which require actual manual grading of advanced (300-level) exams, and they're classes everyone in the business school has to take, it's just not practical otherwise.

That said, this particular class used scantrons for about half the exam questions -- the rest were written and graded by me, the professor, and the other TA sitting around in an empty classroom. (Oh, and that doesn't count the part done on the computers in the lab.) In our department, the intro classes were, depending on the professor, either had exams by scantron, or straightforward and easy-to-grade written ones; the more advanced classes (the ones people taking a minor or major in economics would take) had more involved exam designs.

Also, multiple choice doesn't mean easy, as I can attest personally. Hell, even in the scantron exams, most of the professors had a standing policy that if you could make a good argument for your putative wrong answer, they'd give back partial credit if you had sufficiently solid reasoning.

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"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

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