It’s good to regularly review the benefits and disadvantages of the very commonly used test questions together with test banks that now frequently provide them.
Multiple-choice questions
- Easy and quick to score, by hand or electronically
- Could be written so that they test a wide number of higher-order thinking skills
- Can cover plenty of content areas on a single exam and nevertheless be answered in a class period
- Often test literacy skills: “if the student reads the question carefully, the clear answer is easy to acknowledge even if the student knows little concerning the subject” (p. 194)
- Provide unprepared students the opportunity to guess, sufficient reason for guesses which can be right, they get credit for things they don’t know
- Expose students to misinformation that will influence thinking that is subsequent the information
- Take time and skill to construct (especially good questions)
True-false questions
- Quick and easy to score
- Regarded as “one of the very unreliable kinds of assessment” (p. 195)
- Often written to make certain that a lot of the statement holds true save one small, often trivial bit of information that then makes the statement that is whole
- Encourage guessing, and reward for correct guesses
Short-answer questions
- Quick and easy to grade
- Quick and easy to write
- Encourage students to memorize terms and details, to ensure their knowledge of the information remains superficial
- Offer students a way to demonstrate knowledge, skills, and abilities in many ways
- May be used to develop student writing skills, specially the ability to formulate arguments supported with evidence and reasoning
- Require extensive time to grade
- Encourage usage of subjective criteria when assessing answers
- If utilized in class, necessitate composition that is quick time for planning or revision, which can end up in poor-quality writing
Questions provided by test banks
- Save instructors the right time and energy taking part in writing test questions
- Make use of the terms and methods that are utilized https://essayshark.ws in the book
- Rarely involve analysis, synthesis, application, or evaluation (cross-discipline research documents that approximately 85 percent for the questions in test banks test recall)
- Limit the scope associated with the exam to text content; if used extensively, may lead students to close out that the materials covered in class is irrelevant and unimportant
We tend to genuinely believe that they are the test that is only options, but there are many interesting variations. The content that promoted this review proposes one: Start with a question, and revise it until it may be answered with one word or a phrase that is short. Try not to list any answer alternatives for that single question, but put on the exam an alphabetized list of answers. Students select answers from that list. A number of the answers provided works extremely well more than once, some is almost certainly not used, and there are many answers listed than questions. It’s a ratcheted-up version of matching. The test is made by the approach more challenging and decreases the opportunity of getting an answer correct by guessing.
Remember, students do must be introduced to any new or altered question format on an exam before they encounter it.
Editor’s note: the menu of pros and cons comes in part from the article referenced here. Moreover it cites research evidence relevant to a few of these pros and cons.
Reference: McAllister, D., and Guidice, R.M. (2012). It is only a test: A machine-graded improvement to your multiple-choice and true-false examination. Teaching in advanced schooling, 17 (2), 193-207.
Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, 28.3 (2014): 8. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved.