How To Write Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs)

Multiple Choice questions have been used by educationalists since the early 1900s. Constructed properly and written well, MCQs can be an effective tool for assessing skills and knowledge in your students. Written badly, they can be confusing, demotivating and result in good students being rated poorly and less able students losing the plot.

We might think that multiple choice questions are easy to write , but that is not the case. Considerable skill, care and practice needs to be applied when writing them if you are to avoid confusing your students by asking unanswerable questions with poorly chosen alternative answers.

This post offers some simple tips on how to write effective MCQs painlessly. First, some useful terms: we use the term 'stem' to refer to the question you are asking; we use 'distractor' to describe a possible answer; 'feedback' is used to describe the comments you make on the learners' answers.

How to Write An Effective Stem

Keep the stem as short as you can, avoid complex punctuation and overlong questions.

Try to write your stem as one sentence only - this will be hard at first, but it does get easier with practice.

Try not to test more than one thing per question (you'll know you're doing this if your stem gets very long or you have to use more than one sentence to make the question). It's better to write two well targeted questions rather than one vague one.

Keep instructions for answering the question brief - such as 'Which of the following is a capital city?' or 'Select the season when hurricanes are most likely to occur.'

How To Write Effective Distractors

The first thing to do is to write the expected correct answer. Then think of possible answers a student might give that are feasible, but incorrect. This is easier in some subjects than others. For example you might want learners to identify a magnetic material from a list and use iron, gold, aluminium, silver as distractors. It gets more difficult, though if you want learners to identify the correct parts of speech in an English test as this is less clear cut. Again, through practice, this will get easier.

Avoid including a seemingly ridiculous distractor - using 'hair' in the first example above might lead even very able students away from the point of the question, which might be about choosing components for a small motor.

Try to keep your distractors similar in length as many students become skilled at spotting that the correct answer is always the longest or shortest distractor. If you are new writing MCQs, you will find that you fall into this trap, but keep at it as it does get easier and quicker.

Check the grammar and syntax of your distractors as incorrect usage or clumsy writing means the answer is wrong because the student realises that the writer spent more time on writing the correct answer and just dashed off the distractors.

It is part of received student wisdom to think that distractor B or C is always correct. There is some truth in this - look through some MCQ tests online or examine ones you've written yourself and you will find that many correct answers are in fact B/C or 2/3. To overcome this, review your questions and make sure you have a spread of correct answers in the A,B,C,D 1,2,3,4 range. If you have a radomising software then all the better as it will save you time.

It is often difficult to think of enough distractors to make the offering up to four or five. To get over this some writers often deploy the deadly option of 'All of the above' or 'None of the above.' Please try to avoid doing this as students again know that this is often the correct answer.

If you find you are struggling to write distractors, then consider using a different question type such as True/False, Fill in the blank (also called a cloze test) as some topics just aren't suited to the MCQ approach.

Remember that distractors do not always have to be rendered as text - you can use pictures, diagrams, photos and the like. In some disciplines it is often more sensible to ask students to identify a graphic of something as written distractors can get too wordy and confusing.


How To Write Effective Feedback

We set questions either as formative or summative exercises. Formative questions, where the student can learn from the questions they got wrong should have feedback as you want the students to learn from their mistakes. Summative questions, often used in formal tests do not require feedback, but would need some visual indication of what was right and what was wrong either after each question or at the end of the test as part of a review.

Writing feedback message is a skill that gets better with practice. Here are some tips to help you:

Keep it friendly avoid: 'No! Wrong! Incorrect!

Feedback more than 'Yes, well done' or 'Sorry, that's not correct.' You need to explain why the chosen answer was correct or incorrect. This is a lot of work because to write really useful feedback, you need to write a tailor made response to each distractor. So, that 50 question formative test/exercise can suddenly involve you in many hours of work. Of course, you can always reuse it.


Rob Alton