Can someone explain to me why so many examinations have become multiple choice instead of direct questions requiring you to work out the answer by reasoned deduction?

In my youth it was common to receive 70 per cent of the marks for reasoned calculation and only 30 per cent for the correct answer. Agreed, theoretically you could pass an exam with no correct answers, but at least it proved you knew how to get there.

Of course, my question was rhetorical as the only logical answer is that, in this computerised age, multiple choice is cheaper.

Instead of hordes of educated exam-markers you now only have to pay the equivalent of an organ grinder’s monkey to feed ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ or ‘d’ into a computer program and a new shiny exam pass hurries its way to a poor let-down student who has been misled into believing they have been educated – poor fools.

Of course, the fact they have been badly let down only dawns on them when prospective employers reject them as uneducated, or use them to man customer service phone lines, where the customer is no longer right – and can’t even get a sensible answer after spending hours on an expensive line.

Mick Heavey, Old Marston, Oxford