>It's really a shame that standardized tests haven't yet evolved beyond multiple choice answers for human-written questions and scored by machines with optical

>It's really a shame that standardized tests haven't yet evolved beyond multiple choice answers for human-written questions and scored by machines with optical scanners. They have somewhat, it's called adaptive, or "branched" testing. It is a computer-based test that gives you progressively harder questions to find the limit of your abilities and when you get them wrong it drops the difficulty again in an attempt to try to find out exactly where your knowledge drops off. That's an extremely oversimplified explanation, but you can read the Wikipedia article, which is OK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computerized_adaptive_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computerized_adaptive_testing The problem is money, and to be honest, the motivations of who is buying the test (for some clients the testing is just meant to be a professional barrier to entry or to do the bare minimum to comply with a government requirement.) I worked in standardized testing for almost a decade on nearly every kind of test, helping psychometricians and test administrators, so I saw a lot of bad and good tests.