<p>I don’t care how many problems there are - when you grade a free answer exam with partial credit, it takes considerable time to go back through a wrong answer and diagnose exactly where the student went wrong. Then you have to resolve the problem from the student’s mistake to see if that was the only mistake. </p>
<p>With 200 students, even with a 5 or 6 question short-test, that would at least 100 man-hours of grading. It would take 5 TA’s to be able to get the exam back in a week, and no professor gets 5 TA’s unless it’s a Calculus class.</p>
<p>The only way to get around that is to either take longer to return exams (which students complain about) or to use short cuts in the grading (give points for a certain equation on the sheet, give points for the first part of the answer, etc). However, that method of grading is basically the same as a multiple choice test.</p>