multiple choice questions in entrance exams do not leave room for expression of creative ideas and should be designed keeping the programmes in mindcannot assess creativitythe format is not feasible for assessing creativity but multiple choice questions mcqs can be creatively structured to assess reasoning and analytical abilities the format of mcqs in a sense is a necessary evil when the system has to deal with a vast number of students and to ensure timely delivery and some kind of preliminary filtering however introduction of mcq to counter the fear of subjective bias especially in the social sciences related entrance tests is an example of poor understanding of the domain santosh kumar singh sociologist with the global studies programmeambedkar university delhiassessment should be course specificthe assessment of students through entrance examinations need to be designed as per the nature of the programme for undergraduate programme the mcqs are effective technique to test the knowledge on foundational doctrines and core doctrinal concepts the problem solving analysis and reasoning can be tested through complex hypothetical problems the recent research study of bull and danson demonstrated that mcqs can be used to test all levels of blooms taxonomy a model to classify educational learning objectives however for postgraduate or research programmes the subjective and analytical questions are better suited srikrishnadeva rao vice chancellor national law university nlu odishaadopt advance assessment toolsto succeed in an objective assessment students must have thorough understanding of the concepts to arrive at the right answer sometimes students randomly mark answers to counter which negative marking should be made mandatory for wrong answers in subjective analysis evaluators get to know about students line of thoughts but the same is not possible in mcq based tests however with technological advancements there are plenty of ways to conduct mcq based assessments for analysis of specific skills and it all boils down to the process followed in preparing the questions bs sahay director iim jammumcqs do not allow expression of ideaswhen it comes to the humanities or the social sciences the objective format of mcqs does nothing in determining the critical thinking and depth of knowledge a student has among other things not having a written longform entrance exam does not allow the expression of ideas perspectives and opinions of the applicants the multiplicity and plurality of approaches in dealing with any topic gets overtaken by a unidimensional model which treats a singular answer as the only correct option hindolee datta second year student ma linguistics jawaharlal nehru university jnu