More multiple choice

Sophisticated 5 choice multiple items of the type described below are common in ‘A’ level pure science examinations but less popular in Applied variety. One reason might be that it is more difficult to devise plausible distractors for multiple choice items on Nutrition and Pharmacology. In pure Chemistry the vast scope of factual material and theoretical nature of the subject allows the item writer a freer rein. Most graphs describing experimental data, most alternative solutions to mathematical problems and most of the reactions of a hypothetical element ‘X’ are inherently plausible until the examinee has realised the point of the question. During the course of devising sophisticated ‘multiple completion’ and ‘assertion‐reason’ items for use in Food Science I found considerable difficulty in devising satisfactory items with key D for ‘multiple completion’ (only response No 4 is correct) and key E for the ‘assertion‐reason’ (both assertion and reason are false). This led to the conclusion that it might be desirable to modify the style of the ‘sophisticated’ items and convert them to a 4 choice format. This has little effect on the ‘multiple choice items’ and the ‘classification sets’ but proved positively beneficial with the remaining two types. By eliminating option ‘D’ from the ‘multiple completion items’ and merging options D and E in the ‘assertion‐reason’ a better balanced examination paper emerged. The relative proportions of A, B, C, D, E as the keys to a multiple choice test should of course reflect the laws of averages and not the relative ease of constructing items. There is, however, very little merit in putting very easy items in a test simply to ‘balance up’ the numbers. Appended below are instructions for a practice test using the sophisticated modified items. The author also possesses a 40 item experimental examination paper in the same format with all the items devised by himself (to avoid copyright problems) which he is prepared to circulate for pre‐testing, validation, and so on.