Notes on good questions

In the course, you will also be given the task to read linked resources and to come up with questions on those resources. Here are some guidelines on coming up with good questions.

Characteristics of a good question

A good multiple choice question has the following characteristics:

• It requires reading the relevant materials and thinking about the answers.

• It does not require knowledge beyond the relevant materials.

• It does not verbatim copy of the content.

• The question of the multiple choice question already has meaning: For example, "Which of the following options are true" is not really a good multiple choice question, while a question such as "What are the characteristics of the Deno serve function?" would be a better one.

• All answer options in the multiple choice question should be plausible. For example, for the above question on the Deno serve function, plausible options would include "The serve function starts a web server", "The serve function defines what to do with incoming requests", and "The serve function returns a Response object for each Request". A non-plausible option would e.g. be "It mimics a dinosaur".

• The question focuses, for example, on knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, or evaluation. To read about these concepts, look into Bloom's taxonomy.

• And, this goes without saying, it's created by you.

Points and grading

By default, the system provides points after creating a question, regardless of the question quality. These points can be retracted during grading (or earlier), when the questions are looked into by course staff.

Syntax

You can write the questions either as plaintext questions or using Markdown syntax. As an example, using Markdown, the following question would have a code block with the code console.log("Hello world!");.

Study the following code.

```
console.log("Hello world!");
```

Which of the following options best describe the functionality of the code?

Modifying existing questions

You can also modify the questions that you have previously written. The questions that have been authored by you are found by clicking your email address in the top bar and selecting the option questions. This opens up a page with the questions that you have authored, which you can also modify.