The title says it all.
A lot of my peers agreed that multiple choice questions are silly to use as a "good" assessment. I totally agree with them. Suddenly, 14 Rules For Writing Multiple Choice Questions comes into play and I can't help but agree with the valid points that are brought up by the scholars at Brigham Young University (BYU).
If you have an evil spirit, of course you want to pick out great "plausible distractors". You want your students to be fooled and to prove to you that they know what is going on. Do not give them obvious non-answer choices but instead give them "realistic distractors". Another wise technique is using a question format. I know a lot of us love our fill-in-the-blanks but in reality, question format is the way to go. Ask the student a question and make them answer it directly. You also want to be talking about important concepts. Do not pick out the random, minor facts that no student will remember and instead, pick out the important concepts that students should always keep in the back burner.
Some important things to remember when making multiple choice tests: keep the option lengths similar. You do not want to make it obvious that the answer is the shortest or longest option. Do not allow it to stick out like a sore thumb. You also do not want the correct answer to be the number one choice. Switch it up!! Apparently, the second and third options are the way to go and I have always heard that the "C" option is a good way to go when guessing.
With any test you want to be writing grammatically correct. Do not slip up and give your students a freebie. They will notice and pinpoint what is going on within the test and will prove you wrong if you write something incorrectly. Meanwhile, negative questions confuse everyone. Does the question contain a double-negative? Do students need to guess because the question is not spelt out correctly enough? Make sure the questions make sense to you AND your students!
I hate when teachers give multiple options that can be correct but they ask for the "answer that is MOST correct". Do not confuse yourself and your students. Make sure that the options are different enough that someone CAN pick the most correct answer. Otherwise everyone is going to be lost. Something else to avoid is the "All of the Above" or "None of the Above" options. If these ARE the answer, then the students might not even understand the important concepts being discussed and will just pick these options. If the correct answer even is the "none of the above" option then how will you even know that the students know what THE correct answer is?
If you're going to use multiple choice tests, be smart about it. Make sure that students will understand what is being asked and have various choices available that prove to you that they know what they are talking about.
"14 Rules for Writing Multiple Choice Questions" Brighham Young University. 2001 Annual University Conference. Retrieved on May 27th 2010
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