Multiple-Choice Exams
Writing Effective Multiple-Choice Exams
Accessible Version
By Mike Atkinson, Faculty Associate
Teaching Support Centre
Reflections Newsletter Excerpt
Instructors and students alike often express a certain "distaste" for multiple-choice (MC) exams. While MC exams have the advantage of being easy to grade, the items themselves are frequently described as tricky and unnecessarily difficult. Students may feel that the exam did not test their knowledge of the course material. Instructors complain that items tend to be "low-level" and test recall of material rather than critical thinking. Is it possible to construct a fair, yet challenging MC exam?
Absolutely! The key to an effective MC exam is to construct high-level items that actually reflect the course material. High-level items are those that tap cognitive skills from the top categories of Bloom's (1956) classic taxonomy. Bloom described a six-layer hierarchy of cognitive skills arrayed in the following order: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. At the bottom of the hierarchy, questions require students to simply define, recall or identify information. This is not a complex cognitive activity and leads to only a surface understanding of the material. If we want students to engage in critical thinking, then questions must be structured to access more complex processing, e.g., compare sources of information, extract the appropriate information, formulate a new approach and evaluate how well you have done. This can be done on a MC exam, but care must be taken when constructing the items. Some good examples of questions at each level of the hierarchy can be found at the following website:
http://www.uct.ac.za/projects/cbe/mcqman/mcqappc.html
A good way to begin writing your exam is by constructing an exam blueprint. This is simply a cross-tabulated matrix or spread sheet that indicates the number of items devoted to each level from Bloom for each of the topics to be
Accessible Version
By Mike Atkinson, Faculty Associate
Teaching Support Centre
Reflections Newsletter Excerpt
Instructors and students alike often express a certain "distaste" for multiple-choice (MC) exams. While MC exams have the advantage of being easy to grade, the items themselves are frequently described as tricky and unnecessarily difficult. Students may feel that the exam did not test their knowledge of the course material. Instructors complain that items tend to be "low-level" and test recall of material rather than critical thinking. Is it possible to construct a fair, yet challenging MC exam?
Absolutely! The key to an effective MC exam is to construct high-level items that actually reflect the course material. High-level items are those that tap cognitive skills from the top categories of Bloom's (1956) classic taxonomy. Bloom described a six-layer hierarchy of cognitive skills arrayed in the following order: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. At the bottom of the hierarchy, questions require students to simply define, recall or identify information. This is not a complex cognitive activity and leads to only a surface understanding of the material. If we want students to engage in critical thinking, then questions must be structured to access more complex processing, e.g., compare sources of information, extract the appropriate information, formulate a new approach and evaluate how well you have done. This can be done on a MC exam, but care must be taken when constructing the items. Some good examples of questions at each level of the hierarchy can be found at the following website:
http://www.uct.ac.za/projects/cbe/mcqman/mcqappc.html
A good way to begin writing your exam is by constructing an exam blueprint. This is simply a cross-tabulated matrix or spread sheet that indicates the number of items devoted to each level from Bloom for each of the topics to be