Distractor Efficiency of an Intermediate English Proficiency Course Final Examination Paper

Language proficiency tests have adopted various types of items which include multiple-choice questions (MCQ). Designing MCQ needs a longer time to be completed despite being perceived as easy to administer and mark. After the administration and marking process are completed, the test needs to be analysed to determine the index of facility, discrimination power and distractor efficiency. This study aimed to scrutinise those indices and determine if there is an association between the indices with the functionality of the distractors in an intermediate English Proficiency course final examination paper. With the use of QUEST software, the data were computed to get the difficulty and discrimination indices, and distractor efficiency.The finding showed that there is no clear association between facility and discrimination indices with the distractor efficiency. This study found that certain items had acceptable indices despite having poor or non-functional distractor and certain items had poor indices even though the distractors were functioning as they were intended to. This study concluded that distractor efficiency may have a trivial association to the item facility and discrimination power. Therefore, it is suggested for a deeper investigation to be conducted in terms of the language used to construct the stem and the options.