A Test Maker That Inspires Learning

How to Create Effective Multiple-Choice Test Questions?

Make your question clear:

• Focus on one thing in every question stem – avoid double-barreled questions.
• Make sure your question can only be understood in one way – avoid double meaning and negative phrasing.
• Stay neutral – don’t give away the answer in your question.

Pay equal attention to all answer options:

• Make every incorrect answer option plausible to ensure that answer selection is knowledge-based.
• Avoid overlapping answer options so as not to create unnecessary confusion.
• Keep answer options similar in length and format.
• Randomize answers in every question to avoid an identifiable pattern

Add visuals to questions and answer options:

• Use images and short videos to make your questions and answers clearer.
• Add images, videos, or gifs to your quiz to increase engagement and concentration.
• Just make sure your visuals don’t give away the answer.

What’s the optimal number of answers to a question on a multiple-choice test?

A question stem with four answer options is the most common question type. However, research shows that three answer options (one correct answer and two distractors) are usually as good as four or five.

It’s more about the quality and plausibility of the answer choices than it is about the quantity.   

What’s the optimal number of questions for a multiple-choice test?

Well, it depends. Ten questions can be enough to test your audience’s general understanding of a topic. But if you want to check their knowledge on a deeper level go for 20-25 questions. Make unlimited quizzes and ask unlimited questions.

Is there any limit on the count of questions?

No. With the Opinion Stage online quiz maker, you can create as many multiple-choice items as you like. Before you decide on your test length consider:

• Your audience’s age group and attention span.
• The effort you can and want to put into it.
• The types of questions you plan to ask.
• The time test-takers will have (a multiple-choice question takes a minute to answer on average). 
• Your goal. Longer tests are more challenging while shorter tests get more submissions. 

How does making an online test save time?

• Create your test once and use it multiple times. You can share it as it is, duplicate and reorder it, or use it as a template for future tests.
• Get results automatically. Auto-generated scores and visual answer segmentations make it easy for you to keep track and extract insights. 
• It’s super easy to make it fun and interactive. Configure advanced settings and design without coding. 
• Export all data to any spreadsheet or CMS with a click of a button.

How do you make an online test engaging?

Make it fun for your audience to answer questions:

• Use images and videos to make your test entertaining.
• Make your questions conversational and easy to understand. People respond well to friendliness.
• Keep it interesting by combining different types of questions.
• Be positive. Use encouraging and empowering language to motivate your test-takers.  
• Use more than one question type. Combine multiple-choice, true/false, and yes/no questions.
• Start easy and gradually build-up to the difficult questions.

What would make my test more personal?

There are many ways to make your multiple-choice items more personal. For example:

• Use friendly language that makes the test feel more like a conversation.
• Add some humor to your question stems and answer options (but not at the expense of clarity). 
• Use skip logic to personalize the question path based on your test-takers’ answers. 

How do I make multiple versions of a test?

It’s easy. Once you’ve created one version of your test, go to ‘my items’. This is where you will find all the multiple-choice items, quizzes, surveys, and polls you’ve created with Opinion Stage. 

Click on duplicate to create a copy of the test, and change whatever you like. Reorder the questions, change the images or wording of select questions, etc.