“She looked like the kind of person who asked questions… No good comes of that sort of thing.”
– Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents

It is hard to not have answered some multiple choice questions (MCQs) at some point, whether it is for a survey or for some kind of assessment. Within HE it is common to use MCQs as either a formative or summative assessment. I tend to use these mostly as formative assessments – as few questions each week for students to try so that they can gain some understanding about their knowledge of the weekly material. However, they are widely used as summative assessments, with varying degrees of success.

Some of the advantages of MCQs are:

• Reliable Assessment – Due to the selection of a correct or incorrect answer only this eliminates subjective grading and reduces grader bias compared to open-ended questions, which ensures consistency.
• Efficient – As most systems are now automated it becomes very quick and easy to grade large numbers of students.
• Broad Coverage of Content – As questions tend to be quite short, as only individual answers can be selected, it is possible to test a wide range of topics in a single exam. With properly developed questions different levels of learning, from recall to application, can be tested.
• Quick Feedback – Again as most systems are now automated, the results and general feedback can be given to students very quickly. This allows better learning as the feedback can be applied while students are working on the subject.
• Good Feedback – Cleaver design of the questions and the answers can help students understand common mistakes for questions and provide key diagnostic information for the class.

These advantages do require us to set up the questions well, and if we don’t there can be a number of disadvantages:

• Limited Assessment of Higher-Order Thinking – MCQs often focus on recall rather than deep understanding. It is difficult to assess creativity, reasoning, or problem-solving skills where students just have to select a pre-defined answer.
• Encourages Guessing – Students may choose the correct answer by chance; even well-designed MCQs cannot fully eliminate guessing. Grammatical inconsistencies or pattern-based answers may help students guess.
• Difficult to Write Good Questions – Creating clear, unambiguous, and well-balanced MCQs with a selection of plausible answers is challenging. Poorly written questions may mislead students or be too easy to guess.
• No Method – It can be difficult to determine why students selected incorrect responses, or provide marks for the method. Did the student not understand the question or just make a typo in their calculator.
• Encourages Rote Learning – Students may aim to memorize answers instead of understanding concepts which can reinforce surface-level learning instead of deep learning.

Summary

I find that MCQs can be very useful – as mentioned I like to use them for students formative work rather than for summative assessment. However, I know when I have had classes of over 250 students, having something automatically marked can be a life saver in terms of assessment time, though backed up with some more in depth calculations and discussions that had to be hand marked. It certainly can be done, but it does take some time and experience to be able to set good MCQ that are not too easy for students.