Monday, July 17, 2006

Writing Good Multiple Choice Tests

Right Wing Prof has excellent, practical suggestions.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am going to print this out and put it in the mailboxes of all of my colleagues. I have seen some of my student's tests from other classes and am appalled at some of them. They are either too lengthy, not specific enough (ambiguous), a random selection of facts to be memorized (especially history tests) and/or grammatically incorrect. Many teachers just use the tests that are provided with their adoptions even though they may not have taught all of the info. on the test. If you are testing your students as a true measure of what they have learned and what needs to be retaught than teachers must put significant thought into how they create a test. Especially if the class is weighted heavily on test scores. And don't get me started on some of the district mandated standardized tests and the state tests that we are required to give--they are sometimes the worst offenders when it comes to poor test formats and/or questions.

Ellen K said...

Great link. I just spent most of the past two days in an AP Summer Institute formulating test questions for Art History. It is NOT easy, at least not if you are doing it right.