1 National Journal of Physiology, Pharmacy and Pharmacology 2022 | Vol 12 | Issue 06 (Online First) RESEARCH ARTICLE Assessing an assessment tool: Analysis of multiple choice questions on difficulty level and discrimination power, from an assessment in physiology Afshan Kausar, Sayed Badar Daimi, Trupti Borulkar Department of Physiology, JIIUS Indian Institute of Medical Science and Research, Warudi, Jalna, Maharashtra, India Correspondence to: Trupti Borulkar, E-mail: dr.trupteeborulkar@gmail.com Received: October 25, 2021; Accepted: November 29, 2021 ABSTRACT Background: Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) or ‘‘items” are frequently used in medical education to assess students’ knowledge at the end of an academic session. However, item analysis has to be done to confirm their excellence. This piece of work was aimed to analyze test items in the subject of Physiology. In view of the fact that item analysis has never been conducted in our physiology department, thus this study was planned to assess the quality of MCQs and construct a viable question bank. Aim and Objectives: To evaluate the quality of MCQs used so as to develop a pool of valid items to update the question bank. Materials and Methods: Total of one hundred 1 st year MBBS students were given 40 MCQs. Analysis was done with the item difficulty and item discrimination indices. Results: Difficulty indices (p) of 14 items were easy while about two MCQ were difficult and the remaining 24 of the items were within acceptable range. The discrimination index (DI) (D) for 40 items; one item showed negative discrimination, ten were having poor discrimination, whereas 11 were having excellent discrimination.Nine items were having acceptable, and nine items were having good discrimination. The DI exhibited slight positive correlation with difficulty index (r = 0.1575 P = 0.05). However, it was not statistically significant. Conclusion: The findings show that most of the items were falling in acceptable range of difficulty and discrimination level. It concludes that Item analysis is a very useful and necessary procedure to obtain valid Items from time to time. KEY WORDS: Item Analysis; Difficulty Index; Discrimination Index; Medical Education INTRODUCTION Multiplechoice questions (MCQs), evaluation has become a very important tool in today’s education system. MCQs are mainly used as an excellent comprehensive tool to provide feedback to the teachers at the end of an academic session. A good and reliable MCQ can assess higher cognitive functions such as interpretation, synthesis, and application of Access this article online Website: www.njppp.com Quick Response code DOI: 10.5455/njppp.2022.12.103872202129112021 National Journal of Physiology, Pharmacy and Pharmacology Online 2022. © 2022 Trupti Borulkar, et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creative commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. knowledge. [1] However, it is said that MCQs emphasize recall of factual information rather than conceptual understanding and interpretation of concepts. [2] The single best response type of MCQ is designed to assess knowledge. [3] Designing good MCQs is a complex and time-consuming process. After designing and construction of MCQs; they need to be tested for the standard or quality. They have the advantage of sampling broad domains of knowledge effectively and reliably providing some reliability for assessment. If carefully constructed, MCQs test higher-order thinking skills [4,5] Therefore, MCQs remain a useful assessment instrument; despite some limitations and objections. “Item analysis” refers to quality assessment of MCQs. Item analysis is the process of collecting, summarizing, and using information from student’s responses to assess the quality of National Journal of Physiology, Pharmacy and Pharmacology