A Thirty-First Way to Mess Up a Critical Thinking Test: A Critical Response to Facione

Peter Facione's generally well thoughtout set of suggestions for messing up a critical thinking test l overlooked one significant option for the construction of defective multiple-choice (hereinafter MC) tests: require the impossible. 2 Perhaps Facione was being intentionally devious, leaving this option to be discovered by the intrepid reader, but it appears that one of the MC items he uses to exemplify a different strategy for failure is guilty of requiring the' impossible by not listing a right answer. If, however, Facione was not being devious, then a genuine issue arises concerning the use of sophisticated and complex multiple choice items to test critical thinking. Counseling that one avoid MC items requiring careful analysis, contrary to fact reasoning, hypothetical reasoning and the like, he provides the following example: