Hello everyone! Today, I will be taking about Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) as MCQ is also a type of assessment that are being used in the school. I remembered when I was still young, I LOVE MCQ examination. This is because MCQ exam is very simple and it does not consume a lot of time. If you ask around, you will find out that your friends like MCQ exam for the same reason. They will tell you that they like MCQ exams because they can just "tembak" for the answers and they do not need to study much for the MCQ exams.
The purpose of MCQ exam is to measure the students' knowledge, skills, abilities, values and thinking skills. Even though most of us would agree that MCQ exams are easy and simple, but it can actually evaluate if the students ever do their revision or read through the books. MCQ is very easy to conduct, whereby the teacher will set the items and each items will contain three to four options for the students to choose. Each set of MCQ will have a time limit for the students to answer. For example, one and a half hour for the students to answer 40 MCQ.
MCQ consists of a stem and a set of options. The stem is the question or problem to be solved and the options are the possible answers that the students can choose from.The correct answer in the options is called the KEY and the incorrect answers are the DISTRACTORS.
The advantage of the MCQ is that it takes less time to complete. Each question in the MCQ set only required less than one minute to answer. If you do your revision, when you read the question, you can straight away locate the answers from the options. Because it takes less time to complete, more questions can be assessed. Teachers can set a lot of questions to assess the students because the students doesn't need a long time to answer the questions. Also, MCQ gives feedback in a short time, whereby the teacher only need to mark the correct answers based on the marking schemes. The teachers do not need to think if the students' answers is relevant or not because in MCQ there will only be a correct answer and the rest of the options are irrelevant.
My opinion about MCQ is that students tend to receive higher marks in comparison with the other types of assessments. MCQs are easy and students can score better because they can guess the answers even when they do not study. This can sometimes be very unfair to those who study the whole book and they do not score well than those who just guessed the answers. Besides, MCQ cannot test the students' oral and written skills. Most examinations are to test the students' skills, mostly on their oral and written skills but MCQ does not test those skills. It can only be used to test the students' knowledge, the theories that they have learnt. As for the ways to improve MCQ, I hope the teachers would check the items that they set for the MCQ examinations to ensure that the questions do not repeats. From my experience, there will always be repeated questions for the MCQ exams. Teachers need to check through the questions, from number one to the last question, to ensure there is no questions repeating. Also, the teachers need to be careful when preparing the items for the MCQ to make sure that there is only one key for each question as there will always be incidents like one question having two answers and the students will get bonus marks for that question.
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