Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages

·      Little scope for the learner to guess the correct answer

·      Useful for assessing recall

·      Scoring can be perfectly reliable, rapid and economical

·      Guessing will (or should) contribute less to test scores

·      The technique is not restricted by the need for distractors

·      Cheating is likely to be more difficult

Disadvantages

·      Often difficult to write questions that have only one correct answer

·      Sometimes the word(s) omitted make it difficult to understand the meaning of the sentence

Hints

·      Omit only a relevant key word

·      Use straight forward sentences

·      Check that learners can infer the meaning even without the deleted word

·      Do not use a or an to provide a clue

·      Give credit for all potential answers that make sense