Devising closed-ended test tasks

Also known as multiple-choice questions this kind of tasks involve a variety of chracteristics that must be taken into account for instuctors at the moment of designing an efficient and reliable test. Unexperienced teachers could think that designing a multiple -choice test is as easy as it is at the moment of grade this kind of practical tests, but it is a demanding task to desing tests that really represent our students´ froficiency and development. For this reason I would like to underline those characteristics or guidelines that appear very useful to teachers in the way that them give us a wider idea of test design and the direct  implications of this kind of assessment actvities in our performance due to the better we assess our students best decision we could make to improve our instruction.
So we must take into account:
- A simple and concise stem.
- Avoid unnecesary double negatives or complex wordings in the stem.
- That the stem evaluates what is supposed to.
- The precesnce of inadvertent cues to the right answer
-Avoid vervatim repetition material already thought in class.
- To design distractors of the same grammatical and semantic classas the correct response
- The response alternatives must be grammaticaly compatible with the stem.
- All the alternatives must be equally attractive.
- The distractors must be informative.
-The alternatives must be equally difficult and long.
-There must not be more than one correct alternative
- The alterntives must match the stem.
- The correct response should be derived from common kowledge.
-Alternatives must not refer to other items.