Essay versus Multiple-Choice: Student Preferences and the Underlying Rationale with Implications for Test Construction

INTRODUCTION Many universities are experiencing budget cuts that result in larger classes. The need to teach these larger classes without suffering an excessive reduction in the amount of time available for research and service-related endeavors exerts pressure on faculty to make increasing use of multiple-choice questions on quizzes and exams. Although multiple-choice questions provide the obvious benefit of being easier to grade, their use is in conflict with the intuitive feelings of many faculty that multiple-choice questions are inferior to essays and other open-ended forms of assessment both as a measure and as a promoter of student learning. Previous studies have demonstrated that the use of assessments that test higher-order thinking can encourage students to pursue study strategies that develop a deeper level of understanding rather than utilizing strategies that achieve little more than test-related recall. Previous work has also demonstrated that the use of these deeper learning strategies tends to lead to greater learning, at least for those learning tasks requiring higher-order thinking. This paper will review those results, relating them to the choice between multiple-choice and essay, and also discuss various other strengths and weaknesses of the essay and multiple-choice format. The paper's major purpose is to extend the knowledge of student assessment preferences by investigating the rationale behind those preferences. It will report the results of a survey questionnaire in which undergraduate business students in a junior level Principles of Management course and a capstone Strategic Management course specified not only their preferences for multiple-choice or essay but also the reasons for those preferences. The patterns that result will demonstrate two main factors driving student opinions, one factor focused on the ease of obtaining a high test score (with preferences for multiple-choice) and the other focused on the fairness and validity of the assessment measure (with preferences for essay). These results, in conjunction with various ideas drawn from the literature, will be used to generate examrelated pedagogical recommendations. ESSAY VERSUS MULTIPLE-CHOICE AS A MEAURE OF LEARNING Because the primary goal of an exam is to accurately assess student learning, one of the key issues to consider is whether or not open-ended and multiple-choice questions differ in terms of reliability and validity. The literature tends to favor multiple-choice. For example, Bridgeman (1992) suggested that although multiple-choice is less reliable on a question-by-question basis due to guessing, the fact that multiple-choice questions take less time to answer (and grade) would allow an exam made up entirely of multiple-choice to contain more questions and therefore be more reliable than an exam containing fewer open-ended questions. Hassmen and Hunt (1994) agreed but also suggested that guessing shouldn't be discouraged because guesses are generally based at least partially on student knowledge of the relevant course content. A weakness of essay questions cited by many authors is that they require subjective grading, with even factors that are unrelated to answer content shown to have an impact on exam scores. For example, Powers, Fowles, Farnum and Ramsey (1994) found that handwritten answers tended to be graded more leniently than identical answers written using a word processor. The authors suggested that graders may be more forgiving of handwritten answers because poor penmanship can disguise spelling and grammar errors, because the scratch-outs that appear in handwritten answers demonstrate the students' efforts at improvement and because word processed answers tend to fill less space on the page and therefore may appear to be less complete. A related measurement issue concerns the question of whether or not essays and other forms of open-ended questions truly assess different dimensions of learning than are assessed by multiple-choice. …