Creating effective assessments, such as multiple-choice questions (MCQs), is a time-consuming and laborious process for educators. Crafting well-structured questions that accurately evaluate students’ understanding of the material requires careful consideration of the content, level of difficulty, and potential distractors. Consequently, educators often find themselves spending a long time on question development (or simply create poor questions, quickly). This detracts from their ability to focus on other critical aspects of teaching and student support. Learning how to create MCQs with AI can dramatically reduce the time you spend on assessment development, freeing up valuable hours for more impactful teaching activities.
In this video, I demonstrate how to use generative AI to create MCQs directly from your slideshow presentations (I use Claude but this approach will work with any AI assistant). This approach not only saves time but also helps ensure consistency in your assessment creation process. And because the initial outputs weren’t perfect, I show a straightforward approach to correcting them, ensuring the questions align with the desired level of difficulty and accuracy.
Practical tips for effective AI-generated MCQs
- Review your slides before input. Ensure your presentation contains clear learning objectives and key concepts. This helps the AI generate more relevant questions.
- Start with specific prompts. Request questions that target different cognitive levels (recall, application, analysis) to create a balanced assessment.
- Always validate the output. Quickly review questions for accuracy and alignment with your teaching objectives. Remember, the AI is a helper, not a replacement for your expertise.
- Maintain a question bank. Save successful prompts and their outputs to build a repository of effective questions you can modify for future use.
- Consider the student perspective. Review the generated questions from a student’s viewpoint to ensure clarity and appropriate difficulty level.
The ability to use generative AI to create MCQs opens up exciting possibilities for various higher education settings. Imagine a scenario where you’ve just finished delivering a lecture. Instead of manually crafting assessment questions or a quiz, you could seamlessly generate a short series of MCQs based on the lecture content, ensuring your students’ comprehension and reinforcing key concepts.
This approach could even extend to empowering students to generate practice questions from lecture content, promoting active engagement with the material while building their understanding.
Remember that while AI can significantly streamline the MCQ creation process, your academic judgement remains essential in ensuring the questions effectively assess student learning.
By harnessing the power of generative AI to create MCQs, academics can streamline their assessment creation process, freeing up time and resources to focus on other aspects of teaching and learning.
Looking for other ways to integrate AI thoughtfully into your academic practice? The Generative AI for Academics course helps you develop skills for using AI in research, writing, and teaching – without compromising academic integrity.
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