What are the drawbacks of multiple-choice questions?

Question

I can easily understand the advantage of multiple-choice questions for instance in grading and so. A drawback is that real life problem don't have multiple choice questions all the time for instance calculating a load or a balance of a real thing. Can you comment about the advantages and/or disadvantages with multiple-choice questions in education?

Answer 1

For math exams, multiple choice is a very bad idea.

Let's start with the fact that it is difficult if not impossible to check proofs using multiple choice answers. Even if you only want "technical" questions for say, a math course for engineers, you still run the risk of student's guessing their way through the exam, and alternatively, good students making small calculation errors, and thus getting bad marks that don't reflect their true ability.

The only thing multiple choice is good for, is lazy instructors.

Answer 2

I can give several...

• It checks just the final result, not how the vict^Wstudent came to it. They could just have guessed, or arrived at the right result by some hair-raising incorrect method.
• Can't really check grasp of concepts, just results of some computation
• Many "real world" situations just haven't got right/wrong answers, you want to evaluate if they make (and are able to defend) reasonable assumptions, and work from them. The final answer does then depend on what is assumed...

I'd use multiple choice to check for relatively shallow understanding, and complement with other type of evaluation to dig deeper.