Basic Rules

1. Present a single, definite statement in a concise easy to read stem. Students should know what is being asked from the stem, not from the choices. Eliminate irrelevant material. Address only one piece of information per question.
   
2. Insure that only one response is considered best or correct by experts in the field. If dealing with opinion (as opposed to fact), cite the source.
   
3. Avoid negative statements. Negative words and prefixes are often misread. Never use double negatives. If negatives must be used, capitalize, underline, or otherwise highlight the negative term.
   
4. Use only plausible and attractive alternatives as incorrect response choices. Good response choices are those that can help pinpoint student's knowledge. It is therefore best to include choices that reflect common misconceptions or errors in logic. Furthermore, when choices are obviously incorrect they are, for all practical purposes, not real choices.
   
5. Avoid giving clues to the correct option. Clues can take many forms: inconsistencies in grammar, sentence lengths, structure or style; use of words such as 'always' or 'never'; presenting exhaustive opposites; answers to other questions on the exam, to name a few.
   
6. Avoid interdependent items where the answer to one item is necessary to work on the next item. This does not eliminate the possibility of having multiple questions relating to the same data or passage.
   
7. Use as choices 'all of the above' and 'none of the above' sparingly, if at all. Make sure that these are sometimes the correct and sometimes the incorrect choices.

Tips

1. Avoid irrelevant sources of difficulty. Esoteric terminology should only be used when such terminology is an integral part of the test objective.
   
2. Arrange response choices in a logical order. For example, when dates or numbers are presented as response choices, list them in order. Type answer alternatives in a vertical list.
   
3. Avoid patterns of responses: the correct answer should appear in each of the response positions approximately an equal number of times, and in random order.
   
4. Present the same number of choices throughout the test. This is especially important when students record their answers on a separate answer card. The use of variable number of response choices can cause students to make clerical errors unrelated to their understanding of the material.
   
5. Do not write questions on trivial ideas.
   
6. It is always a good idea to pretest your questions for content, format, and length. TA's generally make a good pre-testers, or bring your questions to the TRC.

Discrimination Index
The Discrimination Index quantifies how well each question differentiates between the top students and the poor students. It is available through the computer-based ScanTron scoring system at the Teaching Resources Center.

See tips for constructing multiple-choice exams, / cheating prevention, / item examples

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