Very Short Answer Questions: A Viable Alternative to Multiple Choice Questions

Abstract

Background Multiple choice questions, used in medical school assessments for decades, have many drawbacks, such as: hard to construct, allow guessing, encourage test-wiseness, promote rote learning, provide no opportunity for examinees to express ideas, and do not provide information about strengths and weakness of candidates. Directly asked and answered questions like Very Short Answer Questions (VSAQ) is considered a better alternative with several advantages. Objectives This study aims to substantiate the superiority of VSAQ by actual tests and obtaining feedback from the stakeholders. Methods Conduct multiple true-false, one best answer and VSAQ tests in two batches of medical students, compare their scores and psychometric indexes of the tests and seek opinions from students and academics regarding these assessment methods. Results Multiple true-false and best answer test scores showed skewed results and low psychometric performance compared to better psychometrics and more balanced student performance in VSAQ tests. The stakeholders’ opinions were significantly in favour of VSAQ. Conclusion and recommendation This study concludes that VSAQ is a viable alternative to multiple choice question tests, and it is widely accepted by medical students and academics in the medical faculty.

Survival Radiology: How a popular in-person interactive medical student radiology workshop pivoted online during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…[17][18][19] Multiple choice question (MCQ) format may be better suited for difficult questions or new content where a prompt could help the participants to answer. 20 On the other hand, open-ended word cloud can add in a layer of challenge and motivate critical thinking for easier questions and concepts. 20,21 In the context of radiology, interactive response images are more suited to directly identify abnormalities directly on radiological images.…”

Evaluation of undergraduate ophthalmology medical students' methods of assessment during COVID-19 pandemic

“…5 Critics of MCQ examination have also raised concerns about whether such questions can assess the higher cognitive levels and the clinical skills needed for professional success. 6 Short answer questions (SAQ) are most often used to test basic knowledge of key facts and terms. SAQ can also be used to test higher thinking skills, including analysis or evaluation.…”

“…7 SAQ can be constructed faster than MCQ. 6 Unlike MCQ, SAQ make it difficult for students to guess the answer. SAQ provide students with more flexibility to explain their understanding and demonstrate creativity than they would have with MCQ; this also means that scoring is relatively laborious and can be quite subjective.…”

Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2022)

“…Short answers, on the other hand, often consist of only one or a few claims, and thus represent a desirable starting point for textual answer clustering. In addition to being a simplified target for studying textual answer clustering, short answers are also a common form of assessment; Very short answer questions have been shown to have desirable traits of reliable assessments, such as the scores showing a fair and balanced distribution (Puthiaparampil and Rahman, 2020). Automated short answer assessment is used in this paper as an umbrella term to refer to compu-tationally assisting the evaluation of short textual answers, while there is no unified definition for short textual answers (Roy et al, 2015).…”