One of the big knocks against the use of PBL is the question of coverage. Critics lament that using cooperative methods limits the amount of material that can be covered by an instructor. True enough. But let us recall that "covering the material is not the same thing as learning." Surely we have enough Fs and Ds in our classrooms to remind us of this fact! Also, it is well to remind ourselves that we faculty are survivors of the lecture system. No wonder we love it. Do students with different learning styles always have to head off to the social sciences and humanities to find a home?

Most of our discomfort comes from the subjective nature of the act, something that we scientists work hard to avoid in our work-a-day world. It may be that we are even predisposed to become scientists because we are looking for a structured and quantifiable world. Flowing from this subjective quandary is the fact that we feel we must be able to justify our grades to the students. We are decidedly uncomfortable if we can't show them the numbers. This is one of the reasons that multiple-choice questions have such appeal for some faculty.

Evaluation of scholarly writing has always been a central activity in the academic enterprise.