An essay question should meet the
following criteria:
1.
Requires examinees to compose rather than select their response.
2.
Elicits student responses that must consist of more than one sentence.
3.
Allows different or original responses or pattern of responses.
4.
Requires subjective judgment by a competent specialist to judge the accuracy
and quality of responses.
Multiple-choice
questions, matching exercises, and true-false items are all examples of
selected response test items because they require students to choose an answer
from a list of possibilities, whereas essay questions require students to
compose their own answer. However, requiring students to compose a response is
not the only characteristic of an effective essay question. There are
assessment items other than essay questions that require students to construct
responses (e.g., short answer, fill in the blank). Essay questions are
different from these other constructed response items because they require more
systematic and in-depth thinking.
Advantages
1.
Assess higher-order or critical
thinking skills.
Essay
questions provide an effective way of assessing complex learning outcomes that
cannot be effectively assessed by other commonly used paper-and-pencil
assessment procedures. In fact, some of the most complicated thinking processes
can only be assessed through essay questions, when a paper-and pencil test is
necessary (e.g., assessing students’ ability to make judgments that are well
thought through and that are justifiable).
2.
Evaluate
student thinking and reasoning.
Essay
questions require students to demonstrate their reasoning and thinking skills,
which gives teachers the opportunity to detect problems students may have with
their reasoning processes. When educators detect problems in students’
thinking, they can help them overcome those problems.
3.
Eliminates Guessing
Essay
type questions eliminates the guessing and as a result provide most authentic
experience of the examinee.
Disadvantages/Limitations
1.
Assess a limited sample of the range of
content.
Due
to the time it takes for students to respond to essay questions and for graders
to score responses, the number of essay questions that can be included in a
test is limited.
Thus,
essay questions necessitate testing a limited sample of the subject matter,
thereby reducing content validity. A test of 80 multiple-choice questions will
most likely cover a wider range of content than a test of 3-4 essay questions.
2.
Are difficult and time consuming
to grade.
Answers
to essay questions are likely to be graded less reliably than other types of
test questions and take considerable time to grade. One of the advantages of
essay questions is that they allow students some latitude in formulating their
responses; However, this advantage comes at the cost of time spent scoring and
reliability in scoring.
3.
Bluffing
The
use of essay questions introduces bluffing, another form of guessing. Some
students are adept at using various methods of bluffing (vague generalities,
padding, name-dropping, etc.) to add credibility to an otherwise vacuous
answer. Thus, the use of essay questions changes the nature of the guessing
that occurs, but does not eliminate it.
