Multiple choice questions are easy to administer and fast to correct. They can be very useful as a part of a whole assessment system. Writing high quality MCQs that probe students' deep understanding and tap onto the whole variation of learning outcomes amongst students does, however, require lots of consideration and careful work. Perhaps more than one might initially expect!

A few resources

The Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University provides an excellent resource for those wanting some guidance in constructing multiple choice questions.
The center also has an interesting resource on "Test-enhanced learning: Using retrieval practice to help students learn"
National Board of Medical Examiners: NBME Item-Writing Guide | NBME

MedEd Lab from Karolinska Institutet: Digital Examination - Writing questions that work

In this video from the webinar (23min), which was part of the MedEd Lab series of webinars, Anna Wiik, discusses strategies for writing questions which work in remote digital examination settings.

Writing Multiple Choice Test Questions

This webinar with Dr Nancy Sulla provides a good introduction to those of you wanting to work with creating multiple choice questions, on writing stems and distractors and linking to cognitive levels from Bloom's taxonomy.

Dr Nancy Sulla's blog IDE (Innovative Designs for Education).

Tips from the webinar:

Question construction: Screenshot from the webinar

screenshot from webinar

Construction hints

These are the main points mentioned by Dr Nancy Sulla in her webinar. For examples see the webinar.

Writing great stems:

A stem should only pose one problem
A stem should stand on its on such that, upon reading the stem and viewing any visual information the student should know the correct answer without reading the options (assuming the student has mastered the content).
A stem should be written as a positive expression; using negative words such as "except" or "not" creates confusion.
A stem should avoid trick questions.

Design Options for questions

Limit the number of options to four
Make sure there is only one acceptable answer
Make sure there is one best answer (refrain from using "all of the above" and "none of the above".
Avoid using absolutes, such as "always" and "never".
Keep the options approximately the same length so as not to give away the answer
Avoid using terms in the options that relate to the stem and will give away the answer.
Make sure the options are worded in a similar way
Make sure the grammar and syntax of both the stem and the options are in agreement
Create distractors that are appealing and plausible.
Make sure to vary your placement of the correct answer; avoid creating a pattern.
The most commonly used answer in a multiple choice assessment is (C). When assembling a test, make sure to review the placement of the keyed responses to avoid using the same letter answer choice more frequently than others.

Writing Distractors:

Make the distractors believable.
Ensure that the distractors represent actual incorrect results you would expect students to produce.

Other external links

Other quick overviews:

Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and learning (The University of Hong Kong)

http://ar.cetl.hku.hk/am_mcq.htm

Good to start with to get help on Multiple Choice questions (structure, advantages/disadvantages and examples)

Back to the complete list of assessment samples