You're lucky this is an engineer heavy forum. Around humanities people, your comment is like pouring gasoline in an open flame.
As an artist myself, I have a huge problem with assessing qualitative analysis using something as mechanical as multiple choice. Authorial intent definitely falls under that umbrella. Rigid assessments would better show the students' ability to recognize the mechanics/techniques of a piece, such as the use of metaphor. And in general, you're really not supposed to speculate about authorial intent anyway.
The university that I attended was going through a power struggle at the time that resulted in a feminist takeover of the English and other departments. In my case, a professor in a course required by the general education requirements took issue with an essay I was required to read in front of the class (which was a story about my families experiences as immigrants), shouted me down and said that I would fail the class and there was nothing that I could do to change that. That was putting my major's GPA requirements at risk, so I had to pursue action with the administration. That wasn't an uncommon event.
My takeaway is to STFU around these topics.
On top of that, poems are meant to be "artsy". I.e. They specifically use certain words in odd ways as part of the artistry of it. It's actually a step in the opposite direction of what "engineering types" would want to do to language in order to make it less ambiguous.
My solution to that was I never took another humanities class.
Eventually I concluded the same thing - that the purpose of the class is not to have me actually think, form opinions, structure arguments and express them - despite what they kept telling us! - but rather to find out what the established interpretation is, and express that in a way that looks like I'm convinced by it. Armed with that knowledge, I proceeded with future essays, and what do you know? They were all As.
That whole experience really soured me up on that business, though, because whatever I was submitting for my assignments, I knew it was all bullshit from my perspective. And you know what? In retrospect, some of my opinions I strongly held then may well have been wrong in part or entirely... but they were my thoughts and my opinions, the real thing, and backed by real arguments. And if I were that 15 year old kid, with the experiences and the mindset formed by them that I had, not a single thing would have changed about them.
So, instead of teaching how to think and argue and express myself, they taught me that you conform to what someone else expects from you, and hide your deviations; or else.
It's a good thing they weren't the only teachers...
But that experience definitely steered me away from humanities, and towards math and sciences. There, at least, there was clear right and wrong, and any occasional ambiguity would be clearly highlighted as such and acknowledged by everyone explicitly. And if you were right, you could be as obstinate as you wanted about it; and if you were wrong, you'd be shown a very clear and objective reason as to why.
Sure, but only to the extent that phrasing around "interpreting text" implies that the meaning sought exists in the text, rather than the cascade reactions taking place in readers upon their careful observation of the piece.
With individual assessment there's far too much room for "I know what you meant" to sneak in. This has come up a lot with job interviews; if you want to interview impartialy, have a fixed bank of questions and grade answers to a rubric.
I think it depends on the subject matter, especially interpretation of art is hard to have one correct answer, an essay test could be graded upon support for the argument etc, where a multiple choice test is really "what did the authors of the test think the author intended?"
If anything, the stereotype is that engineers are overly prone to answer-seeking while non-engineers are much more comfortable with relativism?
If the skill of interpreting a poem is useless (I don't think it is), it doesn't matter which poems are used in the lessons.
Learning your first programming language is a challenge, but once you have done that, subsequent languages are easier because you managed to adopt the programming mindset.
Alternatively, the 68HC11 is a very simple architecture, making it easy to learn the essence of assembly. Using an architecture with more capabilities will be easier than learning to do without. (although cycle counting on an architecture with memory latency is much harder)
it could be better that you learn a commercially
dead language first.
Because it's a simpler language that contains the key ideas and skills that are trying to be taught, and doesn't contain other distracting details that can't be taught until after basic concepts are well-understood.
Same reason lots of people don't like using Java as an intro language even though it's wildly popular. Having students type "public static void main..." a hundred times a semester before knowing enough to be able to understand what "public", "static", or even "void" mean is at best distracting. At worst, it teaches students to use programming languages in highly unprincipled ways.
1. Learning a simple assembly makes learning a second assembly easier
2. Therefore, it's more efficient to learn a simple assembly first
The 2nd statement does not directly follow from the first, because the total time to learn two languages can still be greater than the time to learn the 2nd language alone, even if there is a synergistic effect. I'm assuming here that the simple assembly is not useful, and the goal is purely to learn the 2nd language.
Like, let's say learning a simple assembly makes learning the second language 35% easier. Then learning both languages is better only if the second language would normally take 3x more time to learn.
However, if every subsequent language is also easier to learn, and you intend to learn many more languages, then maybe starting from a simple language will actually be best.
Talking about x86 in particular, it's pretty easy to define a simple, teachable subset of x86 and then expand from there.
The conjecture is that using a simpler language makes it easier to teach the basic concepts, and that more advances features get in the way of teaching those basic concepts.
I'm not saying this is true, just that it's a reasonable hypothesis.
Learning a simple assembly may making learning a second assembly easier, but that's beside the point -- you need the basic concepts before any of the advanced/more complicated features become useful. And if the more advanced language gets in the way of learning the basic concepts, that could justify using a simpler language.
This is a hotly contested topic in CS education research, and we're not going to come to a consensus here.
How do you know that the choice of first assembly language is less important, particularly if you are forgoing the opportunity to learn one that embodies more of what we have learned about how to design them?