Skip navigation.

Heuristics for Test Question Generation

heuristics
[textile] Today at the Workshop on Open Certification we came up with the following (non-ordered) heuristics that might be useful in test question creation: 1) Plausible buzzwords 2) True but irrelevant 3) Write but for the wrong reason 4) Some fool said it 5) My boss will believe it 6) Two conclusions from the same reason 7) Incomplete reason 8) More detail is typical in the correct answer 9) Confusion test techniques 10) Incorrect application of technique 11) Formally phrased answers 12) Read learning objectives first 13) Variations of the theme to make it more challenging 14) Any time you feel the need to mention a source, then try to reword so we do not need to mention the source 15) Invert the cause and effect 16) Avoid inappropriate or confusion humor 17) The correct tends to be similar to the incorrect answer There is no context for this list. This is more for distribution purposes for attendees. Others will post details around this later. The attendees included:
  • Scott Barber
  • Tim Coulter
  • Zach Fisher
  • Dawn Haynes
  • Doug Hoffman
  • Andy Hohenner
  • Paul Holland
  • Kathy Iberle
  • Karen Johnson
  • Michael Kelly
  • Phil Kos
  • Baher Malek
  • Ben Simo
[/textile]

These are for effective distractors

John,

The intent is to use the heuristics to create effective distractors for each question. Some of them are useful in designing good distractors; some are good for identifying bad distractors.

-Mike

Ok, but I'm asking for context anyway...:-)

So these are heuristics for bad test questions? Or is the point being made that all test questions are bad? If these are for generating bad questions, is there a list of heuristics for generating good ones? I wanted to be at the workshop but could not attend, so this is interesting to me.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click 'Save settings' to activate your changes.