I think it may be a little bit harsh to say that multiple choice testing makes students "not only increasingly incapable but also intolerant of being asked to think in complex ways." Now, it may be true that multiple choice tests are a bit easier on students and teachers than a big essay, but I don't think that multiple choice tests make people stupid, nor should they be removed altogether from curriculum.
As I have expressed during class, I think that multiple choice tests are useful and have their rightful place in the education system, especially in classes that cover a wide range of facts, like biology and psychology. Courses like these don't need many essay questions, since there is only so much you can say about what a white blood cell does, and that sort of knowledge would be impossible to test with essays in a single class period.
At the same time, I can see how multiple choice tests do reduce the amount that a student has to think about a test question. Many of the multiple choice tests that I have taken, I could have quite easily walked in without ever hearing the material being tested, and still done very well on the test. On multiple choice tests, you have a pretty good chance of guessing the right answer to start out with, and you can usually eliminate several possible answers with context clues, etymology, or just dumb logic. Occasionally, you get that teacher that likes to be a jokester and will put choices on tests that are simply meant to be funny.
Who can say really what effect multiple choice testing has on our intelligence. I think what we really need is a good balance of different types of testing, and teachers who are competent enough to write good tests. At the end of the day, the choice of which type of test should be used comes down to the teacher and the material.
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