Do’s and Don’ts of Writing Effective Multiple Choice Questions

Thes recommendations/tip are excellent. From my experience regarding multiple choice questions, some of which was gleaned from a mentor, I offer these additiinal thoughts:

The goal of every test is to assess the knowledge of the test taker. The knowledge of the test taker is first and foremost, contingent on how effectively the instructor has presented and conveyed the knowledge to the student. Therefore, every test designer should begin by remembering that a test is a two way process of assessing one's ability to convey information and the ability of students to learn and retain knowledge in addition to the testers ability to design an effective accurate test. In short, a test is both an evaluation of both teacher and student. Accepting that premise, I believe that ideally, the instructor should design the test a priori, followed by the teaching plan.

The multiple choice test offers at least a couple ways to assess how good test questions are. One is that in today's, world, it's possible to randomize the choices of answers in each individual test. This allows some ability to assess the possibility that the order in which the choices are presented for each question introduces bias into the testing process. It also has in certain venues the capacity to limit cheating by test takers.

A second, much more important issue, is to use the overall success rate of the cohort tested to answer each question correctly. This allows the instructor to identify information that was inadequately conveyed during teaching. If a significant number of test takes failed to correctly answer a question, this is cause to consider eliminating it from scoring of the test results for taker. It is also cause for either restructuring the question or eliminating it entirely from future tests. Had the ETS followed this guidance, they would have identified the famous 1982 SAT question that had no correct answer, before some test takers notified them of error.