• Enumerate various types of short answer questions.
• Critically analyse a given short question.
• Frame good short answer questions for various levels of learning.

In the previous chapter, we discussed about advantages and disadvantages of using essay type questions for evaluation of knowledge. You will appreciate that literary presentation, style and similar other factors can influence the marks obtained by two different students who may have the same amount of knowledge. To obviate such a problem, the trend is now changing in favour of what can be called short answer questions (SAQs). At the outset, we may make it very clear that they are not synonymous with short notes, so commonly used in our examination system.

SAQs generally test lower domains of learning, although with practice, it should be possible for you to include evaluation of problem solving skills also.  In their simplest form, they require the student to write a word, phrase, number or sentence to complete a statement or a diagram (hence they are sometimes called 'supply type' tests also, as compared to MCQs, which are called 'selection type' tests).

Properly constructed, they allow themselves to be marked fairly objectively - although on certain occasions, some subjective decision about the correctness of the answer may be required. As a general rule, it can be said that the longer the expected answer, more is the subjectivity involved. Look at the following questions :

Examples

• How many mEq of sodium is contained in 1 litre of WHO ORS ?

• How will you prepare ORS if readymade packets are not available ?
  
  In the first question, the expected answer is 90 and all examiners will mark it similarly. On the other hand, in the second question, the examiner may be required to decide if 2 finger scoops of sugar or 40 gms of sucrose can be accepted as a correct answer. As a corollary, it may be said that the question should be framed in such a way that options available to the student are limited.

SAQs can be presented in many forms. Some of the commonly used formats have been presented below :

Examples

(a)   Completion type : These are probably the simplest questions to frame for testing factual recall. Select a sample of facts which should be essentially known to the students and write it in the form of a statement. Then block out a crucial word or phase from it, which the students is required to supply. See the following examples.

(You may recall having answered some such questions in your school examination like 'Name of capital of India is _________')

Completion type of items can be modified to evaluate slightly higher domains of learning by building them around diagrams, sequential reactions, drawings and formulae. Take a look at some of these.

Example

Complete the sequence given below by supplying the missing links :

B Thalassaemia

Decreased B chain production
Express of ______________
Precipitation inside RBCs

Anemia

Bone marrow expansion

Example

Label the following diagram.

(b) The type of SAQs can be called unique or one best response types. As with completion type of items, these questions also allow themselves to be marked fairly objectively. They can include a variety of learning outcomes as illustrated below :

Examples

• Draw the structure of cholesterol.

• Write the does of Isoniazid (in mg) for a 1 year old child weighing 10 kg.

(Please note that in order to cut down on the options available, the question had to be made longer. Simply asking what is the dose of isoniazid would have made it subjective. We shall discuss this aspect later on.)

• The formula to calculate the does of iron is :
  wt x________x____________

• Arrange the following antibiotics into bactericidal and bacteriostatic groups.
  Penicillin, Choloramphenicol, Cephalosporins, Tetracyclines, Rifampicin.

• A 1 year old child weighing 6 kg is brought with pedal edema and anemia.
  His weight deficit is -%.
  His nutritional status, as per IAP classification will be graded as ----
  Another anthropometic measurement likely to be abnormal in this child is ---------

• A 5 year old patient with family history of seizure disorder is brought with momentary lapse of consciousness.
  What is the most likely diagnosis ?
  What will the EEG show ?
  What is the drug of choice  for this disorder ?
  Write the does of this drug in mg. / kg.

You will see that the last 2 examples test something beyond simple factual recall. They require the student to know certain facts, select the best option out of many, analyse the facts available and then write an answer. However, that adds in the last question depend on the correctness of the first. If the answer to first part is written as per the key but if a student writes the answers as vaso - vagal syncope, the later 2  answer may vary from the key. This may, thus, require some subjective interpretation regarding corrections of the first answer.

(c) Yet another type of SAQs which may be used are called open SAQs. They are called open because they provide some option to the student regarding correct answer. The following questions will illustrate this fact.

Example

• Enumerate 3 side effects of streptomycin.

• Enumerate 3 causes of massive splenomegaly.

• What is the cause of hemolysis in G 6PD deficiency ?

• How will you prevent typhoid in the sibling of a patient suffering from it ?

The first 2 questions require the students to choose 3 options out of the many available while the latter two require him to offer an answer in his own words, based on his understanding. What becomes the issue here is to decide on the priority selected by the student. A student who writes a rare cause of splenomegaly will get the same ranking as one writing say, kala - azar and malaria.

Framing

To ensure that we donot get ambiguous responses and off the mark answers to SAQs, the wording of the questions should be unambiguous so that the moment a student reads the question, an answer flashes in his mind. He should not be required to go into the linguistic aspects of it to interpret what is being actually asked. The question should require a well defined task from the student, leaving very little subjective interpretation. For example, the following completion responses can be marked in a variety of ways, all of which may be technically correct :

-- A neonate is ------- (possible answers : male, female, live baby, preterm, post-term, pink, 2.5 kg etc.)

The question can be better framed as following to prevent such ambiguous responses.

-- A baby is called neonate upto ------ of age.

Example

Look at another example.

-- IMR of India according to 1996 estimates is --------

Setting a paper

You will appreciate that as illustrated in the above example, a point of reference should always be provided  in the questions requiring a numerical answer. This avoids any misinterpretation of the question and therefore of the answer by the examiner as well as the student. Another effective way to restrict the answer to the point is to provide a limit for the expected answer (eg. 'write in about 10 words' or 'write in not more than 2 - 3 lines'). In case the answer is to be written on the question paper itself ,  the space provided to write the answer can be used as an effective indicator of how long an answer is expected. As far as posible , the question should be positively worded ('What should be the drug for use in' rather than what should not be used). If however, a negative question is unavoidable (eg. which drugs should be avoided in a patient with hepatitis), the negative word should be emphasised by writing it in capitals / italics or by underlining it so that the student will not miss it. You should also try to avoid unintentional clues in the form of 'a' or 'an' or answer space which is too proportional to the length of the answer. And lastly, do not forget to indicate the marks alloted to each question or each subpart of a question so that the student knows how much time should be spent on it.

It is a good idea to have the questions validated before using them for actual testing situations. One way for this is to request your colleagues and other subject experts  to go through the paper to see if questions sound alright and suggest modifications if any. It has been time and again seen that such peer review helps to raise the quality of questions to a significant extent.  Another method is to use new SAQs for formative evaluation and then discuss the questions and their answers with the class. This ensures that the students are not penalised on the basis of poor questions.

When SAQs are used in actual practice, they should be subjected to test and item analysis. Briefly, test and item analysis means calculation of 'facility value' and 'discrimination index' of each question and reliability of the whole test. You will learn about methods of calculation and utility of the indices in a later chapter.

Disadvantages

Before concluding, let us introduce you to certain disadvantages inherent in using SAQs. It has been shown that a student has to spend 3 - 4 times more time in answering as SAQ as compared to an MCQ. This reduces the number of questions that can be put in a paper of a given standard time. Reliability of a test paper is directly proportional to the number of questions in the paper. Thus, by being able to includes less number of questions, the reliability of an SAQ paper is always less than that of an MCQ paper. Moreover, marking of open SAQs always involves some degree of  subjectivity and hence marking has to be done by the subject experts.

We can however turn some of the disadvantages of SAQs to our advantage. in our opinion, the most important use of SAQs in every teaching situations is to create a data bank of distractors for framing good MCQs. They provide a rich source of information on possible misconceptions that the students have.