Using Multiple-choice Tests to Evaluate Students' Understanding of Accounting

Abstract

Despite the wide diversity of formats available for constructing class examinations, there are many reasons why both university students and instructors prefer multiple-choice (MC) tests over other examination formats. However, it is not clear whether MC questions assess the same level of students' understanding as constructed-response questions. This paper examines this debate within the context of teaching accounting classes, and reports the analysis of 238 test scores of students from the USA who were given both MC and short-answer questions on the same examination. The results indicate that the scores on the MC questions (and selected additional variables) explained about two-thirds of the variability in the scores on the short-answer questions, suggesting that MC questions can perform adequate assessment of subject mastery. This paper also provides some caveats in interpreting our results and suggests some extensions to the present work.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 44 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.