In a traditional true/false question, students are asked to judge whether a factual statement is either true or false. True/false questions are best suited to assessing surface level knowledge, but can be crafted to assess higher order thinking. Like multiple choice, students can process and respond to true/false quickly, allowing the test designer to assess more content areas in an exam. They are also easy and quick to mark. However, traditional multiple choice is thought to be superior to true/false for several reasons, including:
- Students have a higher probability of guessing the right answer in True/False responses
- True/false questions offer little insight into why students may answer incorrectly
- True/false questions are necessarily absolute; it can be difficult to write questions that are unambiguously true or false.
