Abstract. Multiple choice questions represent a widely used evaluation mode; yet writing items that properly evaluate student learning is a complex task. Guidelines were developed for manual item creation, but automatic item quality evaluation would constitute a helpful tool for teachers. In this paper, we present a method for evaluating distractor (i.e. incorrect option) quality that combines syntactic and semantic homogeneity criteria, based on Natural Language Processing methods. We perform an evaluation of this method on a large MCQ corpus and show that the combination of several measures enables us to validate distractors.
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