Abstract

Background: The accurate, reliable and timely assessment of students is an essential domain of teaching during Medical professional courses. The Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) are time tested method of ready assessment of undergraduate students. Although it evaluates student’s cognitive knowledge but does not evaluate professional skills. However it is said that MCQs emphasize recall of factual information rather than conceptual understanding and interpretation of concepts. Objectives: The main objective of the study is to analyse the items with the help of item analysis and select the items which are good for incorporation into future question bank with reliability. Materials and Methods: This study was done in Department of Anatomy, AIIMS, Patna. A 396 first year MBBS students of different batches took the MCQ test comprising 60 questions in two sessions. During the evaluation process of MCQ’s each correct response was awarded one mark and no marks was awarded for any incorrect response. Each item was analysed for difficulty index, discrimination index and distractor effectiveness. Results: The overall mean of Facilitative value, Discrimination Index, Distractor Effectiveness and Correlation Coefficient was 66.09 (±21.55), 0.26 (±0.16), 18.84 (±10.45) and 0.55±0.22 respectively. Conclusion: The framing of MCQ should be according to Bloom’s classification to assess cognitive, affective as well as psychomotor domain of the students. The MCQ having poor and negative discrimination should be reframed and again should be analysed.

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