Multiple Choice Exams

• Multiple choice questions (choose one answer from among 4-5 choices for each question) are easy to mark, but they encourage guessing.
• Fill-in-the-blank questions are an alternative that requires students to know the answer, not just recognize the answer, but they are much harder to mark because students may choose a term that is correct but not one that the instructor intended (or that the marker recognizes as being equivalent to the "standard" answer).
• A hybrid approach is to provide a list of words or short phrases (in alphabetical order) followed by a number of questions each of which has one of the entries in the list as its answer.
• Students answer as for normal multiple choice, but choose from the entire list, not just a few words or terms given with each question.
• Pure guessing is not helpful (the odds of getting right answer are minuscule), but informed guessing (among 2-3 plausible alternatives) is rewarded.
• Students can use "recognition" to correctly answer a few questions, but if the list of possible answers is long enough, the cannot rely on this for every question because it takes too much time. So they need to know the answer (just like for fill-in-the-blanks).
• Marking is fast and accurate (perhaps even better than for traditional multiple choice because the same letters do not come up again and again on the marking key), especially because only numbers are used (the number for the word or term selected from the list) so poor handwriting is not an issue as it is with fill-in-the-blanks.
• For a one-hour exam 20 of these questions (two pages of questions and one page with the list of possible answers), followed by 3-4 more traditional "essay", "programming" or "do this example" questions is about right. Figure 1 minute for each multiple choice question, on average, when estimating how long students will need for this type of exam.
• The list of possible answers should be on a separate page so sutdents can remove it from the examination booklet so it can be consulted as subsquent pages with questions are being read.