Hi Liz. MCQ format is useful when teachers must evaluate a medium number of students ar the same time.. There are some rules to prepare a MCQ.1. Each question must present at least 5 possible answers.2. None of them may contain the following answer : None of rhe above answers are right (or wrong).3. Some of the answers may contain a cluster of parameters, see if one or more are wrong.4. Each MCQ format requires a given time to be completed. 5. Avoid illogical answers .

I prefer a face to face for each student evaluation in a main examination.

hiya Regina..Thank you for your reply...... I too much prefer face to face however with increasing numbers this is becoming an impossibility in some topics. It is the words/terms that English as second language students have difficulty with that I am wanting to explore to avoid confusion when they read the questions due to differing interpretations.

I find it easy, but the stem becomes somewhat long. Still, if we have one scenario for 4/5 MCQs, and especially of Interpretative type of MCQs, the length of the stem should not be a problem. For formative evaluations of Clinical Subjects this type is the best for developing students' critical thinking & clinical reasoning.

I agree with Ratna and Liz . Sometimes the questions and suggested answers are plenty of abbreviations linked with one single topic .Different interpretations of non- standard abbreviations and over-use of technical abbreviations obscure the questions and answers. References are useful to help professors and students, but they must be well-known by all of them, before the MCQ exam. Clinical subjects are useful to develop technological and clinical MCQ format

In order to design good MCQ, you need to take care of these aspects:

1. the quality of the item construction (wording needs to be simple and clear). there are a lot of resource online. For instance, this is a list of suggestions from University of Pretoria (see pdf, Author: El-Marie Mostert)

2. the selection of particular subject matter to be included in (or exclude from) an MCQ examination

and

3. the cognitive demand of individual items and the overall cognitive demand of the examination.

etc...

I recommend to read this document http://teaching.unsw.edu.au/printpdf/543

hope the information give above help : )

Lai

Technological and cliincal or applied topics shared MCQ format: They must be clearly writen, with important bibliographyc references in full text articles that help any controversy between teachers and students . Short text problems are useful for clinical examinations, sometimes we may introduce imagens to ask about differencial diagnosis, necropsy outcomes, clinical laboratory clusters with one ureadable result

Article [Aprotinin in cardiac surgery: one paper of the year or a pr...

I am a firm supporter of MCQ’s. If you write a good scenario, neither the stem, nor the options need to be long as the stem will refer to the scenario. You can compose many MCQs from one well written scenario. With MCQs you can cover a wide range of content and if you are a skilled educator, you can compose questions aligned with most (if not all) levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.

But to answer your question on what problems have I found when composing the questions? Time. It takes forever to create 10 MCQs that is challenging, yet fair. I also need to remind myself continuously that, although my background is critical care, it is not necessary the same for my management students. Thus the examples I provide, must be relatively generic/general. I also need to incorporate the different Scope of Practices of the students, as I have many international Registered Nurses in my class (I teach at a distance education university).

But the most important problem / challenge is to convince some of my colleagues that I can assess better via the MCQ-option than the essay-option in the exam.

The most common problems I encounter with MCQs are:

1. The all/none options mentioned in a previous answer ("all of the above" "none of the above"). It is easy to use these as "padding," which cuts down on the number of options you have to write, but it also makes the items too easy (or, for people with cognitive difficulties juggling multiple facts, too hard). Also, all correct or all incorrect answers tend to be more obvious when seen as a group, which encourages guessing. It is very hard to come up with 3 or 4 answers which are all correct/incorrect without the intent being obvious. Try it.

2. For all types of questions: Combining two questions in what is supposed to be a single question. For a simple example: "When are people most likely to be irritable and angry?" Irritable and angry are two different states and need to be two different questions. Or: "If you want to put someone at ease and gain their trust..." Again, two different questions, even though the question designer obviously thinks that putting someone at ease and gaining their trust is the same thing.

3. For all types of questions: Obvious extremes: "Setting a limit is never the right thing to do." "Setting a limit is always the right thing to do." Guessing that these will be incorrect will be the right strategy most of the time, since few things are always or never appropriate--and that's what students do, in my experience.