Read these tactical tips to write good distractor answers for your multiple choice questions, both in knowledge checks within lessons and in quizzes.
1️⃣ Alternatives (distractors) should be stated clearly and concisely.
💬 Excessively wordy alternatives assess students’ reading ability rather than learning objective knowledge.
💬 In other words, distractors should only have the amount of words necessary to be meaningful, similar to Tip 3 (’The Stem should not contain irrelevant material) in the Asking Good Multiple Choice Questions.
2️⃣ Alternatives should be similar in content
❌ Alternatives that are dissimilar in content can provide cues to students about the correct answer, thus alerting savvy test-takes to the correct answers.
🚗 Consider a simple example: if the prompt is about mechanics and 3 out of 4 answer choices talk about cars and 1 of the 4 mentions motorbikes, this might be an easy one to eliminate or choose, depending on the context. In the example, all 4 answer choices should use either cars or motorbikes.
3️⃣ Alternatives should be free from clues about which response is correct
🕵️♀️ Sophisticated test-takes are alert to inadvertent clues to the correct answer. These inadvertent clues can be differences in:
- Grammar
- Length
- Formatting
- Language choice
🪞 It is therefore important that alternatives have grammar consistent with the stem, are parallel in form, are similar in length and use similar language.
4️⃣ Generally, the alternatives “all of the above” and “none of the above” should not be used.
♾️ When “all of the above” is used as an answer, test-takers who can identify more than one alternative as correct can select the correct answer even if unsure about other alternative(s).
❌ When “none of the above” is used as an alternative, test-takers who can eliminate a single option can thereby eliminate a second option.
❗ In either case, students can use partial knowledge to arrive at a correct answer.
5️⃣ The alternatives should be presented in a logical order (e.g., alphabetical or numerical)
🎩 This avoids bias toward certain positions. Statistically, correct answers are otherwise usually the second and third option.
🧮 When a logical order (alphabetical, numerical etc) order is not possible, balance the placement of the correct answer. Obviously, randomize correct answer choices is on by default on Learn to Win, so in general this should not be an issue.