Tips for Multiple Choice Exams

Multiple-choice, and other closed response exams (e.g. true/false, matching, binary (a/b), are commonly utilized in online teaching, as they are easy to grade and appear to be more ‘objective.’ However, they are not easy to create. It is challenging to create multiple choice exams that are clearly worded (in question and answer), appropriately challenging, reliable measures of student achievement, fair and equitable. Moreover, even well-designed multiple-choice exams only test lower-order thinking skills and allow for a certain type of learner to succeed.

Pros and Cons of Multiple-Choice Exams

Tips for writing questions and responses:

Question text

• Keep the stem clear and brief.
  • Bear in mind that some online learners may speak English as an additional language or have special needs, such as dyslexia.
  • Long-text questions may confuse or frustrate online learners before they even get around to the response section.
• For higher-level questions (e.g., focusing on analysis, synthesis or evaluation), the stem could have more information, but it should still be brief.

Response options:

Make responses direct and clear

• Do not include extra meaningless information; avoid unnecessarily confusing learners
• The learner should never be able to guess the correct answer from the way the response is written.

Keep formatting consistent

• Make sure all of your answers—the correct answer and the distractors (the incorrect answers)—are consistent in length, font style, etc.
• We don’t want students getting the right answer because it looks different from the wrong answers.

Pay attention to language

• Avoid grammar, spelling, and mechanics errors, which may make it unnecessarily difficult for students.

Careful with ‘All of the above’ or ’None of the above‘

• These alternatives reward learners who don’t know the answers.
• Experts say if you use this option, it should only be correct 1 in 4 times.

Avoid ‘always’ and ‘never’ in distractors

• Choose terms like “usually,” “likely” and “rarely” to keep students from easily eliminating distractors

Avoid double negatives

• The goal is to gauge what your online learners know, not trick them.
• Even those who have a firm grasp of the subject matter can be tripped by trick questions

To see more tips on creating questions, visit the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning’s Designing Quality Multiple Choice Questions and Vanderbilt University’s tips for Writing Good Multiple-Choice Questions

Tips to avoid cheating in online multiple-choice exams

To reiterate, the best way to avoid cheating in online assessments is through the combination of the use of: a series of formative assessments; higher-order thinking summative assessments; a variety of types of assessments; requiring or encouraging collaborative work; and the opportunity for students to demonstrate their mastery of course concepts and skills in multiple ways. 

If you do choose to use multiple choice exams, these tips can help:

• Use randomized questions

  • Rather than having an identical set of assessment tasks provided to all of the students, it is advisable to have a range of assessments (aka a pool of the assessment tasks)
  • For each of the exam attendees, a random selection of the tasks could be carried out
    • For instance, if there is a pool of 30 exam questions and each attendee has to answer 5, the probability of half or more of the questions matching for 2 "collaborative friends" is rather low.

• Require choice explanation

  • Design the multiple-choice exam so that there is a space for students to explain how they chose all/some of their answers
  • You only have to review if you suspect cheating
  • It could give you more insight into where and why confusion among students exists

• Use parameters

  • Limit time for the test, the number of questions students can view at one time, etc.

    
    

To see more suggestions on ways to reduce cheating in online courses, see the University of Washington Bothell’s Strategies to Limit Cheating That Don't Involve Surveilling Students.

References & References

University of Washington Bothell.  Strategies to Limit Cheating That Don't Involve Surveilling Students.

Vanderbilt University. Writing Good Multiple-Choice Test Questions.

Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. Designing Quality Multiple Choice Questions.