ITEM ANALYSIS OF MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS

Any academic course or program is incomplete without an assessment plan. Of late, MCQs have been widely used for assessment of medical and dental undergraduate students. Often enough, poorly constructed MCQs are used that do not fulfil the requirement of an assessment. Therefore, it is necessary that quality of MCQs be frequently evaluated. A quality assessment of MCQs is known as “item analysis”. Item analysis allows identification of good-quality MCQs based on their Difficulty Index (DIF I/P), Discrimination Index (DI) and Distractor efficiency (DE). The aim of this paper was to conduct an item analysis to evaluate the quality of MCQs being used to assess final year BDS students in the subject of Prosthodontics. An internal assessment for the subject of Prosthodontics was undertaken by fifty dental undergraduate students of final year in March 2018. The test consisted of 40 ‘one best type’ MCQs, each with four options a – d. Post-validation of the test was done by item analysis. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 24. Majority (52.5%) MCQs were “too difficult” with a Diff Index less than 30%. About 67.5% MCQs had a poor discrimination index (DI < 0.2). Of the 120 distractors, 62 (51.6%) were non-functional and only 5 MCQs had no non-functional distractors. It can be concluded that the items administered in this test need careful revision to improve their quality before using them in any future assessments.