Question Writing: “Negative” Questions and Choices
by Steven B. Just

During my “Best Practices in Test Development and Validation” workshop two of the item writing rules I teach are:

1. Do not use “All of the Above” as a question choice (if you don’t know why or disagree e-mail me).
2. Do not use double negatives in the question stem (same as above).

Inevitably these two rules raise two follow-up questions from the attendees:

1. If you can’t use “All of the Above” as a question choice is “None of the Above” an acceptable choice?
2. Are single negatives OK in question stems?

My responses, respectively:

1. I consider “None of the Above” an acceptable choice, but be aware: (i) You need to be certain that one of the choices is correct beyond dispute (assuming you intend one of the choices to be correct) otherwise you will have students arguing that “None of the Above” is actually correct, and (ii) It makes the question more difficult (not necessarily a bad thing because most of the tests I see are extremely easy). Why is the question more difficult? When a student answers a “traditional” multiple choice question he/she knows that one of the choices must be correct. So, even if the student does not actually know the correct answer, by a process of elimination he/she can often guess the correct answer. But if there is a “None of the Above” choice then maybe the correct answer is something else entirely, eliminating the use of the guessing strategy.
2. Single negatives are acceptable in stems provided you highlight the negative word (NOT, NEVER, EXCEPT) in some way. You don’t want a student after the fact claiming he/she did not see the negative.

In both cases I would say to use questions with these features sparingly, especially negative stems. A test in which all questions are posed in the negative is tiring on the brain and may be testing logical reasoning ability not subject matter mastery.