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Essay Questions: The Advantages and Disadvantages They Possess

Essay question is one of the tasks teachers usually give their students. The wrong choice of the task may lead to failure in learning.

That is why teachers should check the additional information about essay questions and only then use those in educational process. To check their effectiveness, it is necessary to check the advantages and the disadvantages of essay questions as well as their misconceptions.

Advantages

1. Essay questions give an opportunity to assess students’ abilities and critical thinking skills.
2. Students can show their reasoning abilities via those questions.
3. Students are given an opportunity to provide their authentic experience as the essay questions are usually given with the purpose to give students an opportunity to check their capacity to make decisions rather than choose from existing variants.

Disadvantages

1. Essay questions usually require extended answers. That is why it is impossible to ask too many questions. There are about three or four questions students can cover at the test. Students’ competence in the subject cannot be checked in the full volume.
2. It is difficult to check and assess tests where the essay questions were used because of their length.
3. Teachers are sure that students do not pay much attention to answering essay questions.

Misconceptions

1. Critical thinking skills are assessed no matter how responses are written, either in a limited manner or in detail. In reality, when a question is answered in a limited way, it is difficult to assess the critical thinking skills of a student.
2. It seems that essay questions are easily constructed.
3. Using essay questions teachers are sure that they eliminate the problem of guessing. But, sometimes students provide the answers which are considered to be the universally accepted, not personally created.

All the misconceptions mentioned above about essay questions are wrong and should be checked carefully by the teachers before getting down to test construction.