Advantages and Disadvantages of various kinds of Test Questions

It’s good to regularly review the advantages and disadvantages of the very widely used test questions and also the test banks that now frequently provide them.

Multiple-choice questions

• Easy and quick to score, by hand or electronically
• Can be written so they test a wide selection of higher-order thinking skills
• Can cover lots of content areas on a single exam and nevertheless be answered in a course period
  

• Often test literacy skills: “if the student reads the question carefully, the clear answer is easy to acknowledge regardless of if the student knows little in regards to 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 can influence subsequent thinking about the information
• Take time and skill to make questions that are(especially good

True-false questions

• Easy and quick to score

• Regarded as “one of the very most unreliable kinds of assessment” (p. 195)
• Often written in order that most of the statement holds true save one small, often trivial little bit of information that then helps make the whole statement untrue
• 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, so that their comprehension of the information remains superficial

• Offer students a chance to demonstrate knowledge, skills, and abilities in many ways
• Enables you to develop student writing skills, specially the power to formulate arguments supported with reliable essay writing service evidence and reasoning

• Require extensive time to grade
• Encourage usage of subjective criteria when answers that are assessing
• If utilized in class, necessitate quick composition without time for planning or revision, which can end up in poor-quality writing

Questions given by test banks

• Save instructors the hard work involved with writing test questions
• Make use of the terms and methods that are used in the book

• Rarely involve analysis, synthesis, application, or evaluation (cross-discipline research documents that approximately 85 percent of the relevant 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 material covered in class is irrelevant and unimportant

We tend to believe that these are the only test question options, but there are many interesting variations. The content that promoted this review proposes one: Start with a concern, and revise it until it may be answered with one word or a phrase that is short. Do not list any answer options for that question that is single but affix to the exam an alphabetized list of answers. Students select answers from that list. A few of the answers provided may be used over and over again, some is almost certainly not used, and there are many more answers listed than questions. It’s a ratcheted-up version of matching. The test is made by the approach more challenging and decreases the possibility to 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 list of advantages and disadvantages comes in part from the article referenced here. In addition it cites research evidence strongly related many of these pros and cons.

Reference: McAllister, D., and Guidice, R.M. (2012). This will be only a test: A machine-graded improvement to your multiple-choice and true-false examination. Teaching in Higher Education, 17 (2), 193-207.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, 28.3 (2014): 8. © Magna Publications. All rights reserved.