Identifying academic success and underperformance: The discriminative power of very short answer questions and multiple-choice questions
Elise V van Wijk, Floris M van Blankenstein, Bastian N Ruijter, Jos H T Rohling, Jolein van der Kraan, Friedo W Dekker, Alexandra M J Langers · 2026
Read Identifying academic success and underperformance: The discriminative power of very short answer questions and multiple-choice questions by Elise V van Wijk, Floris M van Blankenstein, Bastian N Ruijter, Jos H T Rohling, Jolein van der Kraan, Friedo W Dekker, Alexandra M J Langers (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/plos-pone-0349318.txt.
Description
van Wijk and colleagues, in a 2026 study, compare two exam question types for telling strong medical students from struggling ones. Multiple-choice questions are efficient but invite guessing and cueing. Very short answer questions force students to produce the answer themselves. The team mined six exams from three cohorts of medical students in their first and second years.
Single short-answer items separated students more sharply than single multiple-choice items in every exam. Across exams, short-answer scores also tracked students' overall grade averages more strongly, and were better at flagging both the weakest and the strongest fifth of students. The authors argue the format earns its marking cost: used across a program, short answers can spot students who need help earlier, and confirm excellence more fairly. They place the work within a standard framework for judging whether a test measures what it should.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Elise V van Wijk, Floris M van Blankenstein, Bastian N Ruijter, Jos H T Rohling, Jolein van der Kraan, Friedo W Dekker, Alexandra M J Langers |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 35149 |
| LICENSE | CC_BY |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | PLOS |