Home » Education & Career » Testing and Assessment » Writing them well: Multiple-choice questions Part 2

Writing them well: Multiple-choice questions Part 2

© Amanda Kendle

Plenty of people think multiple-choice questions are a really bad way to test students. You can’t blame them for thinking this when students can attend courses and read articles about the “tricks” multiple-choice questions and how to get the best scores on these tests - for example, the hint that the longest answer is likely to be correct; and that questions with “all of the above” or “none of the above” are great because you only have to be sure that, say, two of “the above” four options are correct to know that “all of the above” will score you the points.

So if students have become “test-wise” to multiple-choice questions and are getting some of their marks from knowing about sloppy question writing habits rather than the subject they’re supposedly being tested on, does this mean multiple-choice questions have had their day? The great part about them is, once they have been written, they are quick and easy to mark (and in fact are often automatically marked by computers), and this means they are still a very useful testing tool, especially in large scale testing where resources for marking other types of tests are restrictive.

This means teachers have to become more “test-wise” than students and design questions which accurately test both knowledge and application of knowledge, without the flaws of questions which mean students have a good chance of guessing the right answer without too much studying. Some of the most important tips for writing effective multiple-choice questions are:

Have most of the relevant information in the stem or “question”, and only list short answers - one word or short phrases - as options. In fact, the question should be answerable without looking at any of the options.

Write questions which require students to reason out a solution rather than simply recall facts and figures.

Use plausible distractors for the different options - the aim should be that each option would be selected by at least some students.

Make sure all the options follow on grammatically from the question.

Have an answer which would be agreed upon by a group of experts. If a group of experts would have difficulty reaching consensus on the correct answer, the question is not valid.

Do not use vague terms such as rarely, often, commonly, frequently, usually - experts can’t agree on what these mean, let alone students.

There are still many testing situations where a practical approach to deciding on a style of test is very important, especially when resource issues such as marking time and costs are involved. For this and other reasons, multiple-choice questions will continue to play a big part in education over future years. However, it’s important that these questions are designed so that they really do test students appropriately, and not just have them see it as a kind of “game”, using the hints given to them to guess correct answers. Multiple-choice questions need to be carefully written to ensure they are an effective testing mechanism, and this article has outlined some of the initial steps that can be taken to ensure this. Future articles will discuss this issue in greater detail, with a focus on the kinds of knowledge and application which can be tested, and how.

The copyright of the article Writing them well: Multiple-choice questions Part 2 in Testing and Assessment is owned by Amanda Kendle. Permission to republish Writing them well: Multiple-choice questions Part 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.