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 Rationale

Critics declare that Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs, for brevity) assess only the lowest levels of student learning and offer students greater opportunities to guess at answers. They reward memorization while failing to stimulate communication, critical thinking, and analysis skills.

These complaints are often justified, particularly in regards to MCQs garnered from textbook supplements. But MCQs as assessment items can be defended on several points. In most fields, multiple forms of assessment are necessary because none are comprehensive or without drawbacks. MCQs’ obvious advantage is that they can be quickly graded, more so with computer technology. It may be true that broadly, education in the information age should de-emphasize memorization in favor of learning interpretation and creation skills. But many instructors argue that in order to build or exercise these skills, even college students need to learn some basic facts or concepts that previous education, popular culture, or internet searches do not typically provide. Carefully written MCQs can even test somewhat higher-level learning, such as comparison, application, and possibly basic analysis, focusing on particular concepts.

Unless employing a proctor or costly technologies and web services, an instructor cannot monitor student behavior if the student is taking an exam outside the classroom, either composing answers on paper or through a web-based exam system. A common assumption among faculty is that if a student has access to source material, such as a course textbook, their class notes, or the internet, then multiple choice questions are useless.

But with careful question-writing and assessment design, MCQs can still be useful tools online. Quick quizzes, or sets of MCQs, can be useful formative assessments, serving as auto-graded, low-stakes homework that lets students know how they are doing. Employing features included in many learning management systems, even exams can have multiple choice questions that challenge students to demonstrate what they have learned.

The advice below is directed at aiding instructors to get the best out of MCQs, and to demonstrate that MCQs still have some value even for online quizzes and exams. But within larger exams, instructors should use MCQs together with other question types or activities that enable students to demonstrate what and how they have learned, in different ways.

Traditional Guidelines for Good Multiple Choice Questions

Treat exam writing as a process, with drafting and revising stages. Don’t try to write more than a few MCQs in a single day. One tactic is drafting one or two questions after you craft a lesson or teach a class, when your sense of what you are teaching is strongest. Later on, revise these questions together. Check to make sure that each has a clear correct answer and that other options are clearly wrong. Decide whether any question yields the answer to another too easily.

Reusing MCQs is practical, but draft a few new MCQs each time you teach a course, so to be able to swap out questions in the active question bank, and occasionally retire a few questions.

The general instructions for the multiple choice questions should be explicit, both within the exam itself, and your discussion of the exam in class: Read the questions carefully. Choose the best answer, the one for which no room for quibbling or reasoned debate exists.

If you find yourself repeating a phrase across answer options, include it in the question stem, for efficiency.

For example, if I want students to choose the correct definition of Historiography, the stem should be “Historiography is the study of,” instead of including “is the study of” in each answer option.

Answer options should not quote sources. Appropriately rephrase them away from textbook language or favorite ways you say things in class. If you have specific reasons to use key terms, phrases, or ways of wording things, consider adding such clues in both correct and incorrect answers throughout the exam.

include at least three wrong answer options or “distractors” that are clearly incorrect to prepared students, but plausible nonetheless. Silly answers don’t help assess student comprehension. If you're really struggling to find a fourth distractor for a question, consider jargon (even invented) that sounds plausible only to the unprepared.

Negative question stems should be used sparingly. If you must, highlight the negative modifier for clarity: “Which of the following was NOT true concerning 1964 Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater?” “Margaret Sanger advocated all of the following except:” Avoid double negatives.

Be consistent in grammar, spelling, capitalization, syntax, and formatting. Carefully edit your questions to eliminate typos. If you copy and paste parts of questions between computer programs, be sure that font style and size, spacing, and other attributes are consistent. Any inconsistently can otherwise genuinely or misleadingly hint at a right or wrong answer.

Considerations for Online Exams

MCQs should be considered within the context

of good online exam design.  MCQs are best employed when delivered to students from a larger question bank, at random, with perhaps answer choices randomized within each question.