Summary

A bank of multiple choice questions that can be used to examine first year linguistics students. Some 69 HEIs currently offer courses which include Linguistics as a named portion of an undergraduate degree, and most of these run a general introductory course - often called An Introduction to Language and Linguistics, or some variation on this theme. These courses attract large numbers of students, and therefore represent a significant marking burden for first year teachers. At the same time, these introductory courses often cover much the same ground in different institutions. These factors suggest that there is a strong case for sharing examination questions at this level. The fact that many institutions now use multiple choice questions in first year examinations opens up the possibility of establishing a national item bank for linguistics. A bank of this sort would allow institutions to set first year examinations with formally defined characteristics, and thus help to standardise achievement at this level.