Three Answer Options Are All You Need on Multiple-Choice Tests!
While we are used to providing 4 options in multiple choice questions, using 3 is just effective. Writing good distractors is the hardest part of writing multiple choice questions. If you only have to write 2 distractors instead of 3, you can create questions faster. While it's not mentioned in this post, reducing the number of options also immensely reduces the complexity of branching scenarios.
So here’s the main finding: <u>no significant differences were found in terms of item difficulty</u>. There were also <u>no differences found in terms of test reliability</u>. Thus, Baghaei and Amrahi (2011) concluded that three answer options are all you need. If the test characteristics are essentially the same, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to spend our time developing additional answer options.
Rodriguez (2005) argues that shifting to three answer options also increases the amount of content that can be tested. Because students don’t have to spend as much time reading four or five answer options, there will be more time during the test for students to read additional questions on different course content. Instead of spending your time on identifying more answer options, spend your time developing additional test questions.