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UNION EUROPÉENNE DES MÉDECINS SPÉCIALISTES
EUROPEAN UNION OF MEDICAL SPECIAL ISTS
Association internationale sans but lucratif
International non-profit organisation
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A Guide to Successfully Writing Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs)
Peter G. Mills, Mark A. Westwood, Alfred Tenore
“Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the
wisest man can answer”
Charles Caleb Colton (1780 – 1832)
The purpose of this review is to provide guidelines that can be used by the UEMS community to assist
them in a challenging task of writing effective and high quality MCQs.
In 1956, Benjamin Bloom published a taxonomy of cognitive learning as a hierarchy of
knowledge
,
comprehension
,
application
,
analysis
,
synthesis
and
evaluation
. Through the years, educators have
adopted Bloom’s taxonomy for test development and simplified and organized it to include the
following three categories:
1)
knowledge
(recall or recognition of specific information),
2) combined
comprehension
and
application
(understanding or being able to explain in one’s own
words previously learned information and using new information, rules, methods, concepts,
principles, laws and theories), and
3)
problem solving
(transferring existing knowledge and skills to new situations).
Since the desired outcome of an educational program requires that “learners” do more than recall
facts, MCQs should be carefully designed to assess, as much as possible, problem-solving capabilities
which increase the validity of the examination.