Tips for Improving Testing and Grading

When I told the saleswoman at the Teachers College Bookstore what I was looking for - a practical guide to constructing multiple choice tests - she said something to the effect of "Practical? You won't find anything like that here." But then she dug around in a corner and came up with one copy of this 100-page paperback. This book read so easily, and addressed the key issues so directly, that I finished it off on two subway rides and immediately implemented the recommendations on my company's multiple-choice tests that accompany self-study guides. Subjects include "clueing" - smart test-takers who answer questions by eliminating wrong answers - and the differences between absolute and normative tests. I'm not a professional educator. If I were, I would probably find more faults with this book. But it served my purpose very well. Multiple choice tests may have problems, but unfortunately, I have to use them, and so I need to know how to construct them. This book told me how, in a way that was painless or even fun. One criticism: I would like to have seen a discussion of how long a multiple choice test needs to be in order to be confident with a given level of certainty - say, 95% - that the correct answers are not due to chance alone. (If you want to answer this question, I recommend another inexpensive paperback - The Harper Collins Dictionary of Statistics - specifically the 3-page entry on the binomial distribution.)