McKeachie's Teaching Tips is a book IMHO all instructors should possess. There is a guideline in there for that and just about every other question you have. I don't remember the guideline and I am now at home and McKeachie is on my bookshelf at school.
However, here is another issue to consider, I published a paper some years ago that showed that you don't need 4 or 5 options to an MC items. A good MC item only needs 1 correct answer and 2 really good foils. It is very hard to come up with more than 2 really good foils. Most of the time, when students pick an incorrect response they tend to alternate between no more than 2 foils. This means that with 4 or 5 options the instructor wasted time to come up with a useless foil(s), and students wasted time to read the foil that could immediately be eliminated from the running quite often. So all of this is to advocate for using only 3 foils per MC item for 2 reasons: less work making up good exam items (I'd like to think that we use test banks as a point of departure and then fine tune items to work better for us). But more importantly, and back to the point of your query, it allows each student to spend less time on each item and you can sample more knowledge (have more items) on your exam :-) Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 [email protected] ---- Original message ---- >Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:43:14 -0700 >From: Sally Walters <[email protected]> >Subject: [tips] time for mc exam questions >To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <[email protected]> > >Is there a general guideline for how much time to allow on an intro psyc >midterm exam for each multiple choice question? I have heard 30 seconds, 45 >seconds - just wondering what people think is reasonable. The questions >themselves are from a testbank for Weiten. > >thanks, >Sally Walters >Capilano U > > >--- >To make changes to your subscription contact: > >Bill Southerly ([email protected]) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
