Advantages of Multiple Choice Items

1. Versatility – Multi Choice Items are adaptable to the measurement of a wide variety of learning outcomes including reasoning, making inferences, solving problems, exercising judgement and demonstrating knowledge of facts through interpretation and analysis of information
2. Efficiency – Because of the large number of items that can be posed in a given length of time, MC items permit wide sampling and broad coverage of the content domain.
3. Scoring accuracy and economy – expert agreement on the correct answer to MC items is easy to obtain, and machine or clerical assistants can economically apply scoring keys.
4. Reliability – consistency in scoring and wide sampling of content provide test results that can be generalized to the domain of interest.
5. Diagnosis – patterns of incorrect responses can provide diagnostic information about the learning of individual students or groups.
6. Control of difficulty – the level of difficulty of a test can be increased or decreased by adjusting the degree of similarity among the options to the items.
7. Reduction of guessing – in comparison with two-choice (e.g true false) tests, guessing is reduced with MC items.
8. Freedom from response sets – MC items are relatively uninfluenced by response sets, such as a tendency to answer ‘true’.
9. Amenable to item analysis – item difficulty (the percentage of students who select the correct response) and item discrimination (a correlation coefficient that indicates how well the item separates students who know the material well from those who do not) can be used to improve MC items and inform instruction.