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Centre for Teaching Excellence » Resources » Teaching tips » Assessing students »

Exam Questions: Types, Characteristics, and Suggestions

Examinations are a very common assessment and
evaluation tool in universities and there are many
types of examination questions. This tips sheet
contains a brief description of seven types of
examination questions, as well as tips for using each
of them: 1) multiple choice, 2) true/false, 3)
matching, 4) short answer, 5) essay, 6) oral, and 7)
computational. Remember that some exams can be
conducted effectively in a secure online
environment in a proctored computer lab or assigned
as paper based or online “take home” exams.

Multiple choice
Multiple choice questions are composed of one question (stem) with multiple possible
answers (choices), including the correct answer and several incorrect answers
(distractors). Typically, students select the correct answer by circling the associated
number or letter, or filling in the associated circle on the machine-readable response
sheet.

Example: Distractors are:

A) Elements of the exam layout that distract attention from the questions
B) Incorrect but plausible choices used in multiple choice questions
C) Unnecessary clauses included in the stem of multiple choice questions
Answer: B

Students can generally respond to these type of questions quite quickly. As a result,
they are often used to test student’s knowledge of a broad range of content. Creating
these questions can be time consuming because it is often difficult to generate several
plausible distractors. However, they can be marked very quickly.

Tips for writing good multiple choice items:

Avoid Do use

In the stem: In the stem:

 Long / complex sentences  Your ow

 Trivial statements  Single, c
 Negatives and double-negatives
 Ambiguity or indefinite terms, absolute statements, and broad generalization In the choices:
 Extraneous material
 Item characteristics that provide a clue to the answer misconceptions  Plausibl
 Stateme
In the choices:  True sta
 Short op
 Statements too close to the correct answer  Correct
 Completely implausible responses  Alternat
 ‘All of the above,’ ‘none of the above’  At least
 Overlapping responses (e.g., if ‘A’ is true)

Suggestion: After each lecture during the term, jot down two or three multiple choice
questions based on the material for that lecture. Regularly taking a few minutes to
compose questions, while the material is fresh in your mind, will allow you to develop
a question bank that you can use to construct tests and exams quickly and easily.

True/false
True/false questions are only composed of a statement. Students respond to the
questions by indicating whether the statement is true or false. For example: True/false
questions have only two possible answers (Answer: True).

Like multiple choice questions, true/false questions:

 Are most often used to assess familiarity with course content and to check for
popular misconceptions
 Allow students to respond quickly so exams can use a large number of them to
test knowledge of a broad range of content
  Are easy and quick to grade but time consuming to create

True/false questions provide students with a 50% chance of guessing the right answer.
For this reason, multiple choice questions are often used instead of true/false
questions.

Tips for writing good true/false items:

Avoid Do use

 Negatives and double-negatives  Your own words

 Long / complex sentences  The same number of true and false statements (50 / 50
 Trivial material statements than true (60/40) – students are more likely to
 Broad generalizations  One central idea in each item
 Ambiguous or indefinite terms

Suggestion: You can increase the usefulness of true/false questions by asking students
to correct false statements.

Matching
Students respond to matching questions by pairing each of a set of stems (e.g.,
definitions) with one of the choices provided on the exam. These questions are often
used to assess recognition and recall and so are most often used in courses where
acquisition of detailed knowledge is an important goal. They are generally quick and
easy to create and mark, but students require more time to respond to these questions
than a similar number of multiple choice or true/false items.

Example: Match each question type with one attribute:

1 Multiple Choice a) Only two possible answers

2 True/False b) Equal number of stems and choices
3 Matching c) Only one correct answer but at least three choices

Tips for writing good matching items:

Avoid Do use

 Long stems and options  Short responses 10-15 items o

 Heterogeneous content (e.g., dates mixed with people)  Clear directions
 Implausible responses  Logically ordered choices (ch

Suggestion: You can use some choices more than once in the same matching exercise.
It reduces the effects of guessing.
Short answer
Short answer questions are typically composed of a brief prompt that demands a
written answer that varies in length from one or two words to a few sentences. They
are most often used to test basic knowledge of key facts and terms. An example this
kind of short answer question follows:

“What do you call an exam format in which students must uniquely associate a set of
prompts with a set of options?” Answer: Matching questions

Alternatively, this could be written as a fill-in-the-blank short answer question:

“An exam question in which students must uniquely associate prompts and options is
called a
___________ question.” Answer: Matching.

Short answer questions can also be used to test higher thinking skills, including
analysis or
evaluation. For example:

“Will you include short answer questions on your next exam? Please justify your
decision with
two to three sentences explaining the factors that have influenced your decision.”

Short answer questions have many advantages. Many instructors report that they are
relatively easy to construct and can be constructed faster than multiple choice
questions. Unlike matching, true/false, and multiple choice questions, short answer
questions make it difficult for students to
guess the answer. Short answer questions provide students with more flexibility to
explain their understanding and demonstrate creativity than they would have with
multiple choice questions; this also means that scoring is relatively laborious and can
be quite subjective. Short answer
questions provide more structure than essay questions and thus are often easy and
faster to mark and often test a broader range of the course content than full essay
questions.

Tips for writing good short answer items:

Type of question Avoid Do use

All short-answer  Trivia 

 Long / complex sentences 


Fill-in-the-blank  Taking out so many words that the sentence is meaningless 

Suggestion: When using short answer questions to test student knowledge of
definitions consider having a mix of questions, some that supply the term and require
the students to provide the definition, and other questions that supply the definition
and require that students provide the term. The latter sort of questions can be
structured as fill-in-the-blank questions. This mix of formats will better test student
knowledge because it doesn’t rely solely on recognition or recall of the term.

Essays
Essay questions provide a complex prompt that requires written responses, which can
vary in length from a couple of paragraphs to many pages. Like short answer
questions, they provide students with an opportunity to explain their understanding and
demonstrate creativity, but make it hard for students to arrive at an acceptable answer
by bluffing. They can be constructed reasonably quickly and easily but marking these
questions can be time-consuming and grader agreement can be difficult.

Essay questions differ from short answer questions in that the essay questions are less
structured. This openness allows students to demonstrate that they can integrate the
course material in creative ways. As a result, essays are a favoured approach to test
higher levels of cognition including analysis, synthesis and evaluation. However, the
requirement that the students provide most of the structure increases the amount of
work required to respond effectively. Students often take longer to compose a five
paragraph essay than they would take to compose five one paragraph answers to short
answer questions. This increased workload limits the number of essay questions that
can be posed on a single exam and thus can restrict the overall scope of an exam to a
few topics or areas. To ensure that this doesn’t cause students to panic or blank out,
consider giving the option of answering one of two or more questions.

Tips for writing good essay items:

Avoid Do use

 Complex, ambiguous wording  Your own word

 Questions that are too broad to allow time for an in-depth response  Words like ‘com
 Clear and unam
 A breakdown o
 Time limits for

Suggestions: Distribute possible essay questions before the exam and make your
marking criteria slightly stricter. This gives all students an equal chance to prepare and
should improve the quality of the answers – and the quality of learning – without
making the exam any easier.

Oral Exams
Oral examinations allow students to respond directly to the instructor’s questions
and/or to present prepared statements. These exams are especially popular in language
courses that demand ‘speaking’ but they can be used to assess understanding in almost
any course by following the guidelines for the composition of short answer questions.
Some of the principle advantages to oral exams are that they provide nearly immediate
feedback and so allow the student to learn as they are tested. There are two main
drawbacks to oral exams: the amount of time required and the problem of record-
keeping. Oral exams typically take at least ten to fifteen minutes per student, even for
a midterm exam. As a result, they are rarely used for large classes. Furthermore, unlike
written exams, oral exams don’t automatically generate a written record. To ensure that
students have access to written feedback, it is recommended that instructors take notes
during oral exams using a rubric and/or checklist and provide a photocopy of the notes
to the students.

In many departments, oral exams are rare. Students may have difficulty adapting to
this new style of assessment. In this situation, consider making the oral exam optional.
While it can take more time to prepare two tests, having both options allows students
to choose the one which suits them and their learning style best.

Computational
Computational questions require that students perform calculations in order to solve
for an answer. Computational questions can be used to assess student’s memory of
solution techniques and their ability to apply those techniques to solve both questions
they have attempted before and questions that stretch their abilities by requiring that
they combine and use solution techniques in novel ways.

Effective computational questions should:

 Be solvable using knowledge of the key concepts and techniques from the course.
Before the exam solve them yourself or get a teaching assistant to attempt the
questions.
 Indicate the mark breakdown to reinforce the expectations developed in in-class
examples for the amount of detail, etc. required for the solution.

To prepare students to do computational questions on exams, make sure to describe

and model in class the correct format for the calculations and answer including:

 How students should report their assumptions and justify their choices
 The units and degree of precision expected in the answer

Suggestion: Have students divide their answer sheets into two columns: calculations in
one, and a list of assumptions, description of process and justification of choices in the
other. This ensures that the marker can distinguish between a simple mathematical
mistake and a profound conceptual error and give feedback accordingly.

Five Basic Types of Questions

What types of
questions are
you asking
students?
Mastering five
basic types of
questions.

©Leslie Owen
Wilson

All educators,
no matter what
level, need to
be able to craft
and create at
least 5 basic
types of
questions. The
art of asking questions is an ancient part of good teaching and one of the rudimentary
skills all teachers should be able to master. Socrates believed that knowledge and
awareness were an intrinsic part of each learner. Thus, in exercising the craft of good
pedagogy a skilled educator must reach into learners’ hidden levels of knowing and
awareness in order to help them reach new levels of thinking through thoughtfully
developed questions.

As you examine the categories below, reflect on your own educational experiences and
see if you can ascertain which types of questions were used most often by your different
teachers. Hone your questioning skills by practicing asking different types of questions,
and try to monitor your teaching so that you include varied levels of questioning skills.
Specifically in the area of Socratic questioning techniques, there are a number of sites on
the Web which might prove helpful, simply use Socratic questioning as a descriptor.

1. Factual – Soliciting reasonably simple, straight forward answers based on obvious

facts or awareness. These are usually at the lowest level of cognitive (thinking) or
affective (feeling) processes and answers are frequently either right or wrong.

Example: Name the Shakespeare play about the Prince of Denmark?

2. Convergent – Answers to these types of questions are usually within a very finite range
of acceptable accuracy. These may be at several different levels of cognition —
comprehension, application, analysis, or ones where the answerer makes inferences or
conjectures based on personal awareness, or on material read, presented or known. While
these types of questions are valuable in exercising mid-level cognitive thinking skills, it is
quite easy to expand students’ cognitive processes even higher by adding another layer to
these questions whereby teachers ask students to justify their answers in light of the
evidence offered or the inferences made.

Example: On reflecting over

the entirety of the play
Hamlet, what were the main
reasons why Ophelia went
mad? (This is not
specifically stated in one
direct statement in the text of
Hamlet. Here the reader
must make simple inferences
as to why she committed
suicide.)

3. Divergent – These
questions allow students to
explore different avenues and create many different variations and alternative answers or
scenarios. Correctness may be based on logical projections, may be contextual, or arrived
at through basic knowledge, conjecture, inference, projection, creation, intuition, or
imagination. These types of questions often require students to analyze, evaluate, or
synthesize a knowledge base and then project or predict different outcomes. Answering
these types of questions may be aided by higher levels of affective thinking as well —
such as valuing, organization, or characterization. Responses to these types of questions
generally fall into a wide array of acceptability. Often correctness is determined
subjectively based on the possibility or probability of the proposed answer. The intent of
these types of questions is to stimulate imaginative, creative, or inventive thought, or
investigate “cause and effect” relationships.

Example: In the love relationship of Hamlet and Ophelia, what might have happened to
their relationship and their lives if Hamlet had not been so obsessed with the revenge of
his father’s death?

4. Evaluative – These types of questions usually require sophisticated levels of cognitive

and/or emotional (affective) judgment. In attempting to answer these types of questions,
students may be combining multiple cognitive and/or affective processes or levels,
frequently in comparative frameworks. Often an answer is analyzed at multiple levels and
from different perspectives before the answerer arrives at newly synthesized information
or conclusions.
Examples:

a. How are the the deaths of Ophelia and Juliet the same and yet different? (Compare and
contrast.)

b. What are the similarities and differences between Roman gladiatorial games and
modern football?

c. Why and how might the concept of Piagetian schema be related to the concepts
presented in Jungian personality theory, and why might this be important to consider in
teaching and learning?

5. Combinations – These are questions that blend any combination of the above.

You can easily monitor what types of questions you are asking your students through
simple tallies and examining degrees of difficulty. Or, if your students are older, then ask
them to monitor the types of questions you ask, allowing them to identify the types. For
those of you who might be a bit more collaborative or adventurous in your teaching and
want to give students some ownership in their educational processes, challenge them to
create course related questions to ask one another. In my many years of teaching I was
always pleasantly surprised at what students came up with.

For more details please see This Rough Magic – Lindley, D. (1993) This rough magic.
Westport, CN. Bergin & Garvey.

__________________________

Lynn Erickson was a principal and has written a number of books on different
educational topics. In the one cited below she also tackles types of questions as a topic
but she divides them into factual, conceptual and provocative.

If you look at my discussion above based on Lindley’s divisions, it should become

apparent that these are some of the same types of categories as Erickson’s. Her factual are
still the ones that are easily answered with definitive, and comparatively simple answers.
These are the questions that you find on the show Jeopardy. Unfortunately they are also
too common in schools and on tests.

Her conceptual questions might be ones that are convergent, divergent, or evaluative in
construction — ones that delve deeper and require more sophisticated levels of cognitive
processing and thinking.

Her provocative ones are ones that entice, and ones that cannot be answered easily. They
are questions that can be used to motivate and frame content or ones that could be
classified as essential questions. In the initial categorization above they would be either
complex divergent questions or more sophisticated combination questions like
divergent/evaluative ones.

Erickson, H. L. (2007) Concept-based curriculum and instruction for the thinking

classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA. Corwin Press.(Amazon link goes to the newest 2nd
edition of this book)

__________________________

Leslie’s comments: Please remember that questions should be about exercising mental
agility and recall, and getting students and children to think in new and complex ways.
Questions should not be just about getting that one correct answer. Parents can also
encourage higher levels of thinking and feeling by using questions to connect with their
children’s lives and interests, and by rediscovering the lost arts of friendly discussion and
polite discourse. Sadly, and almost wholly due to our growing obsession with our phones
and social media, we are in danger of losing the abilities to interact face-to-face in polite
ways and in meaningful intellectual ways.

There is a fine edge between polite, lively discussions that get minds thinking and
engaged, and hearts pumping, compared to out of control, hostile argumentation. Being
able to discern the differences and adjust one’s social/emotional interactions accordingly
is a valuable skill.

Innate curiosity, asking questions throughout life, is a strong human trait. It is how we
find and solve problems. Encouraging children to think, to learn, to remember, to make
inferences and connections through questions is a very ancient form of education – one
that needs to be perpetuated, understood, and practiced.

Contact Leslie

How to create essential questions. Learn more about how to develop key questions and
how they can help direct your teaching and cultivate students’ critical thinking skills.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Types of Test Questions

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD ﾧ
1

14

It’s good to regularly review the advantages and disadvantages of the most commonly
used test questions and the test banks that now frequently provide them.
Multiple-choice questions
Advantages

 Quick and easy to score, by hand or electronically

 Can be written so that they test a wide range of higher-order thinking skills
 Can cover lots of content areas on a single exam and still be answered in a class
period

Disadvantages

 Often test literacy skills: “if the student reads the question carefully, the answer is
easy to recognize even if the student knows little about the subject” (p. 194)
 Provide unprepared students the opportunity to guess, and with guesses that are
right, they get credit for things they don’t know
 Expose students to misinformation that can influence subsequent thinking about
the content
 Take time and skill to construct (especially good questions)

True-false questions
Advantages

 Quick and easy to score

Disadvantages

 Considered to be “one of the most unreliable forms of assessment” (p. 195)

 Often written so that most of the statement is true save one small, often trivial bit
of information that then makes the whole statement untrue
 Encourage guessing, and reward for correct guesses

Short-answer questions
Advantages

 Quick and easy to grade

 Quick and easy to write

Disadvantages

 Encourage students to memorize terms and details, so that their understanding of

the content remains superficial

Essay questions
Advantages

 Offer students an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge, skills, and abilities in a

variety of ways
 Can be used to develop student writing skills, particularly the ability to formulate
arguments supported with reasoning and evidence

Disadvantages

 Require extensive time to grade

 Encourage use of subjective criteria when assessing answers
 If used in class, necessitate quick composition without time for planning or
revision, which can result in poor-quality writing

Questions provided by test banks

Advantages

 Save instructors the time and energy involved in writing test questions
 Use the terms and methods that are used in the book

Disadvantages

 Rarely involve analysis, synthesis, application, or evaluation (cross-discipline

research documents that approximately 85 percent of the questions in test banks test
recall)
 Limit the scope of the exam to text content; if used extensively, may lead students
to conclude that the material covered in class is unimportant and irrelevant

We tend to think that these are the only test question options, but there are some
interesting variations. The article that promoted this review proposes one: Start with a
question, and revise it until it can be answered with one word or a short phrase. Do not
list any answer options for that single question, but attach to the exam an alphabetized list
of answers. Students select answers from that list. Some of the answers provided may be
used more than once, some may not be used, and there are more answers listed than
questions. It’s a ratcheted-up version of matching. The approach makes the test more
challenging and decreases the chance of getting an answer correct by guessing.
Remember, students do need to be introduced to any new or altered question format
before they encounter it on an exam.
Editor’s note: The list of advantages and disadvantages comes in part from the article
referenced here. It also cites research evidence relevant to some of these advantages and
disadvantages.
Reference: McAllister, D., and Guidice, R.M. (2012). This is only a test: A machine-
graded improvement to the multiple-choice and true-false examination. Teaching in
Higher Education, 17 (2), 193-207.
Reprinted from The Teaching Professor,ﾧ 28.3 (2014): 8. © Magna Publications. All
rights reserved.