Item Analysis of Multiple Choice Questions in Pharmacology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52206/jsmc.2020.10.2.%25pKeywords:
Item analysis, MCQs Quality, Evaluation, pharmacology.Abstract
Background: MCQs type assessment in medical education is replacing old theory style. There are concerns regarding the quality of the Multiple Choice Questions.
Objectives: To determine the quality of Multiple Choice Questions by item analysis.
Material and Methods: Study was a cross sectional descriptive .Fifty Multiple Choice Questions in the final internal evaluation exams in 2015 of Pharmacology at Bacha khan Medical College were analyzed. The quality of each Multiple Choice Questions item was assessed by the Difficulty index (Dif.I), Discriminative Index (D.I) and Distracter Efficiency (D.E).
Results: Multiple Choice Questions that were of moderate difficulty were 66%. Easy were 4% and high difficulty were 30%.Reasons for high difficult Multiple Choice Questions were analyzed as Item Writing Flaws 41%, Irreverent Difficulty 36% and C2 level 23%. Discrimination Index shows that majority of MCQs were of Excellent Level (DI greater than 0.25) i.e 52 , Good 32% . (DI=2.15-0.25), Poor 16%. MCQs Distracter Effectiveness (DE)= 4, 3,2,1 were 52%, 34%, 14%, and 0% respectively.
Conclusion: Item analysis gives us different parameters with reasons to recheck MCQ pool and teaching programme. High proportions of difficult and sizable amount of poor discriminative indices MCQs were the finding in this study and need to be resolved
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 The authors retain the copyrights. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g. in institutional repositories or on their website), as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as greater citation of published work.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Readers may “Share-copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format” and “Adapt-remix, transform, and build upon the material”. The readers must give appropriate credit to the source of the material and indicate if changes were made to the material. Readers may not use the material for commercial purpose. The readers may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.