Writing Multiple-Choice Items
Multiple-Choice (MC) items have many advantages that make them widely used and highly regarded. They also have disadvantages, some of which can be reduced by careful attention to good item-writing and item analysis practice.
Advantages of Multiple-Choice Items
Versatility -- MC items are adaptable to the measurement of a wide variety of learning outcomes including reasoning, making inferences, solving problems, exercising judgment and demonstrating knowledge of facts through interpretation and analysis of information.
Efficiency -- Because of the large number of items that can be posed in a given length of time, MC items permit wide sampling and broad coverage of the content domain.
Scoring accuracy and economy -- Expert agreement on the correct answer to MC items is easy to obtain, and machine or clerical assistants can economically apply scoring keys.
Reliability -- Consistency in scoring and wide sampling of content provide test results that can be generalized to the domain of interest.
Diagnosis -- Patterns of incorrect responses can provide diagnostic information about the learning of individual students or groups.
Control of difficulty -- The level of difficulty of a test can be increased or decreased by adjusting the degree of similarity among the options to the items.
Reduction of guessing -- In comparison with two-choice (e.g., true-false) tests, guessing is reduced with MC items.
Freedom from response sets -- MC items are relatively uninfluenced by response sets, such as a tendency to answer "true."
Amenable to item analysis -- Item difficulty (the percentage of students who select the correct response) and item discrimination (a correlation coefficient that indicates how well the item separates students who know the material well from those who do not) can be used to improve MC items and inform instruction.