How Many Options do Multiple-Choice Questions Really Have?

Abstract

One of the major difficulties–perhaps the major difficulty–in composing multiple-choice questions is the writing of distractors, i.e., the incorrect answer options. Yet distractors play an obviously essential role in determining the effectiveness of a question. Item analysis, and more specifically the analysis of item distractors, is an established tradition. However, only minimal item analysis of ubiquitous multiple-choice question banks accompanying marketing texts has been published and no analyses of distractors. This study describes the extent to which distractors do not, in fact, distract in five such question banks.