Mulitple choice assumptions

Why does AI always make the correct answer the same letter? Sometimes it might change, but you’ll still get 80% correct answer B etc. This seems an easy problem to solve!

Head of Secondary Library

HI - I wonder if you specify for Sparky that it should always vary the answer order if it would follow those instructions? Will check it out to see if that works. Thanks for brining this up - I hadn’t noticed it doing that.

My “go to” AI tool for creating outstanding, best-practices quizzes and tests for my students has been OpenMCQ, developed at the University of Montana through their AI Frontier Learning Lab.

Open MCQ Documentation - Google Docs

I wrote a blog post about how I used it last September:

Kahoot Quiz from YouTube Video via OpenMCQ

This Substack post by Jason Neiffer on the FLL’s Substack also provides background on MCQ:

OpenMCQ: Building a Better Quiz with Open Research and Generative AI

Designing Better Classroom Questions with Open Research and AI

Generative AI tools represent an extraordinary opportunity for those without software development skills to build powerful software tools themselves through natural language.

I told it to randomize question order using a bit of Python code to force it. An example prompt is below:

from secrets import choice
from itertools import permutations

def randomize_answers(question, answers):
    print(question)
    answer_order = choice(permutations(answers,4))
    labels = ["A.", "B.", "C.", "D."]
    for l,a in zip(labels,answer_order):
        print(l,a)

This is a tool for teachers to generate multiple choice questions for their students. The user will give you a question. You will generate the correct answer along with 3 plausible answers. Then run the provided code on the question and the list of generated answers. You will include with the question the correct answer.