How a little black dress and MCQ have more in common than you think

Multiple choice questions are like a little black dress; they are versatile. A little black dress does it all, slims your figure, appeals to all shapes and types of women and never goes out of style. Multiple choice questions have that same feeling of always being dependable.

Regardless of what grade or subject, multiple choice questions can be used for assessment. Similar to a black dress where you can dress it up with a pair of heels or make it casual with a pair of flats or flip flops. Multiple choice questions can be as simple or complex as you want them allowing students to analyze, discriminate or interpret a variety of concepts and information. Using it for assessment not only provides a valid test because it enables the teacher using multiple-choice items to test a broader sample of course content in a given amount of testing time. Consequently, the test scores will likely be more representative of the students’ overall achievement in the course (Burton, Sudweeks, Merrill & Wood, 1991).

As almost every women will say you can never have enough options. As beneficial as clothing or assessment options are, limitations are always possible and you must find what is suitable. Good multiple-choice test items are generally more difficult and
time-consuming to write than other types of test items. As versatile as they are, multiple choice questions cannot display thought processes, provide students opinions, produce original ideas and allow students to provide examples(Burton, Sudweeks, Merrill & Wood, 1991). Reliability is also effected due to that fact that guessing is still a viable option for students that may skew results.

Whether you're shopping for a special occasion or creating an assessment for the end of your unit, versatility and quality should always be part of the decision process. For the next assessment you are planning make sure that the questions you create have clear instructions, are complete sentences, emphasize higher level thinking and allow students to take the knowledge they have learned and apply it to a situation(BYU, 2001). Happy Shopping...I mean grading!