AUTHORS of this page Jon Maber with contributions and revisions from Andrew Booth, Lawrence Hamburg and Terry Wassall of the University of Leeds
MCQ authoring may be the most demanding form of creative writing there is. Poorly thought out questions can confuse and frustrate students and have a negative impact on their performance on your course. Some rough guidelines are provided here but this is not the place for an exhaustive review of the art of MCQ composition.
It is absolutely vital that you make a list of the knowledge and competencies that you wish to assess. (In the case of MCQ papers in @Bodington@, remember that theseare self-assessment or practice papers and the assessment objectives may be different to those you would list for your formal assessment.) Contrary to popular belief MCQ papers can test more than factual recall but there are limitations to the assessment objectives they can cover. Here are some examples of what you can and cannot test:
There are many different forms of test in which the student is offered multiple answers to questions. In the tests available via @Bodington@, each question always has five alternative answers. You may decide that you will design questions which always have one correct answer and four wrong ones. These are true Multiple Choice Question(MCQ) tests. Alternatively, you may decide to design questions in which more than one of the five alternative answers are correct. Although we tend to call these MCQ as well, more correctly they are Multiple Response (MRQ) tests. As we will see, MRQs offer some advantages over MCQs. In the Nathan @Bodington@ Building, you can design both MCQ and MRQ questions. You can design tests in which some questions are MCQ and others are MRQ. For good educational (and programming) reasons, you cannot design questions in which none of the answers are correct - Irrelevant Choice Question (IRQ) tests are not available via @Bodington@.
Any MCQ or MRQ test will contain questions together with alternative answers. At least one answer must be correct. The other, wrong, alternatives are referred to as distracters. It is generally much more difficult for academics to create distracters than to write the correct answers. As an expert in your field of study, your familiarity with the subject will probably make it difficult to predict the misconceptions that confuse students. A good distracter must not be obviously wrong, yet it must be unequivocally incorrect. It is not easy to devise a single distracter, and it is much harder to devise the four of them required for a true Multiple Choice Question. Since distracters are so hard to write, MRQ tests are becoming increasingly popular, since they contain more correct answers and hence fewer distracters. If you tell your students thatfor each question, "at least one alternative answer will be correct, but any or all alternatives may be correct", you will not make yourself popular, but you will at least discourage the random guessing that true MCQ tests can produce. Since a student is allowed to select any number up to five responses to each MRQ it is essential that some element of negative marking is applied - otherwise a student can select all options on all questions and score 100% on the paper.
Some tips:
Who was the Prime Minister of Jamaica in 1997?
The simpler the question, the harder it is to write good distracters. (It was P.J. Patterson. Sir Florizel Glasspole was Governor General of Jamaica. Probably abad distracter, but a wonderful name.)