Impact on item analysis of multiple choice questions in engineering mathematics among pre-final year technical students in South India - A dataset

The purpose of the study is to examine the impact of item analysis of multiple choice questions (MCQs) in technical mathematics amongst 148 third year engineering students at MepcoSchlenk Engineering College, Tamil Nadu, India. In India, formative assessment has been commonly used in all technical institutions to inculcate the understanding of teaching and learning process amongst stakeholders. One of the formative assessment techniques is multiple choice questions, in which the instructor can give the feedback imminently after test, so that students could understand their mistakes and instructors can identify the challenging portion for students. For this study, convenient sampling has been adopted and item analysis has been carried out, which includes difficult index, discrimination index and distractor efficiency. This study aims to analysis the MCQ items aiming to test the understanding of partial derivatives, probability and statics, Laplace transform, fouier transform, Operation Research, numerical methods, graph theory and discrete mathematics portions from the prescribed syllabus. In addition, this study is to identify the cognitive levels of MCQ questions, which is used in this study. 50 multiple choice questions irrespective of all topics in the prescribed syllabus has been used. The poor discrimination index has been identified and irrelevant distractor has been changed.