“Use an HB pencil, fill each circle completely without any stray marks, and write your name clearly.” These are the rules I have learned when taking tests that consist of multiple choice questions.

Over the last several years that my teachers and professors have administered multiple choice tests and exams, I have constantly questioned the effectiveness and purpose of them. As much as I personally dislike the idea of testing through MCQs, I was curious to find out what experts had to say about them and whether or not they were the most appropriate methods of testing academic potential, intelligence and understanding.

Experts say that multiple choice questions are “sort of” the best way to test a students’ knowledge. Multiple choice tests are quick and test students on a wide range of material in a short amount of time. They’re also cheap to administer and this is important to consider in environments where state governments are continuously mandating testing. Although experts say that multiple choice questions are the not the best way to assess high-order thinking skills, they certainly are easy to design, trial, score and revise.

No wonder we often see questions used in previous exams, with just a few components changed here and there…

So now that we know a little bit about why multiple choice questions are used, I’m curious to know how multiple choice tests are actually designed. I often come out of an exam and hear students complaining about how the questions were “tricky and difficult”. Many a times, I wonder if an exam even tested my knowledge of the course material or if it was just out to get at me. Is it possible to create a perfectly fair, yet challenging multiple choice exam? I did a little bit of research.

According to Mike Atkinson, a professor at UWO, an effective multiple choice exam is one which consists of high-level items that accurately reflect the course material. What are high-level items? Those that basically address cognitive skills from the top categories of Bloom’s classic taxonomy. His taxonomy consists of a 6-level hierarchical structure of cognitive skilled arranged in the following order: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Questions from the bottom of the hierarchy require students to define, recall or identify information, while those from the top of the hierarchy encourages students to engage in critical thinking. Critical thinking? It requires you to compare your sources of information, extract the appropriate information, formulate a new approach and then evaluate how well you’ve done. Multiple choice exams allow you to do just this.

Next, I was curious to know what went through a professors mind when constructing an exam. I came across an EXAM BLUEPRINT, which is 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 covered” on the exam. So if a final cosseted of Chapters 10/11/12 and lecture content, the blueprint would look like this:

As can be seen, this exam has 67 questions which are equally distributed across the topics.

An exam blueprint allows professors to validate the learning outcomes of a course. It is also suggested that the exam blueprint be shown to students so that they can “assess the kind of knowledge” that would be useful for them to know.