A multiple-choice test usually has dozens of questions or items. They are sometimes called “selected-response tests.” For each item, the test-taker is supposed to select the “correct” choice among a set of four or five options but often the “correct answer” is exchanged for the “best” answer. And the “best” answer is determined by the choice made by the majority of the people who take the test.
Let’s start with this item:
Which one of these game balls does not belong with the others?
A. Basketball
B. Soccer Ball
C. Football*
D. Baseball
* The “best” answer. The other answer options are called “distractors.”
This is where the fun begins. The obvious answer is the football and the shape of the ball, a prolate spheroid, has been the factor in that decision – ignore the three spheroids.
But you have Jose and Tracey in your classroom. Jose is shortstop on his junior high school baseball team so he thinks about it. He lets his creative juices flow and he says to himself, “The baseball. It’s the only ball that is solid - not filled with air.”
Tracey, an equally critical thinker and soccer star, says to herself, “I really want the soccer ball to be the answer, so, let’s see . . . all of the other balls have only one color - my soccer ball has black and white sections.”
Meanwhile, back at the Testing Center, they will be noting, “The statistics show that more than half of the children who answer this item say that the answer is football, so that’s the best answer and we will call it ‘the correct answer.’”
So, both Tracey and Jose are “wrong.”
Multiple-choice items are best used for checking whether students have learned facts and routine procedures that have one, clearly correct answer. They work best in math where you don’t get to have an opinion about the best answer for the square root of 64. However, an item may have two or more reasonable answer options. Therefore, test directions usually ask test takers to select the ‘best’ answer –
which, to them, means the one most chosen
What Should we Do?
Leave your imagination at the door when you enter the room to take an “objective test.” You have to think the way the test makers think, so choose the answer that jumps out at you, fill in the circle, and move on. If you follow the kind of thinking that Tracey and Jose did, you will also be using up a lot of time - time you can’t afford to waste.
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