Everything You Wanted to Know About Multiple-Choice Questions*

*but were afraid to ask.
This session will introduce audience members to the relatively untapped potential of multiple-choice questions for both formative and summative assessments in law school classes. The presenter is an unapologetic lover of the multiple-choice format and believes that law school professors are, too--they just don't know it yet. The session will explore the following questions:
1. Why do so many people hate multiple-choice questions, and why are they used on nearly every high-stakes standardized test?
2. Given the need for more regular feedback loops in legal education, what kinds of question formats work best for assessing student proficiency with different learning outcomes at different points during a semester?
3. What are the best practices for writing high-quality multiple-choice questions?
Beth Donahue is a lawyer who worked at several CALI conferences in the days when laptops weighed 20 pounds each. She is a former editor and Program Director of the Multistate Bar Examination, as well as a former manager of a large technical team developing online assessment programs for K-12 standardized tests. She is the co-founder of BarCrowd LLC, an assessment consulting company developing innovative crowd-sourcing assessment and learning tools for law schools.