The distractor that 41 out of 60 students chose
You chair the S4 English panel at a Hong Kong secondary school with 168 S4 students. A colleague has drafted a four-option multiple-choice item for the mid-year reading paper, which is built on a 480-word article about rooftop beekeeping in Singapore. The sentence the item depends on reads: 'Where councils once treated rooftop hives as a novelty, several now treat them as a public health matter - a shift that has less to do with bee stings than with the paperwork that follows a swarm.'
Item 7. In what way have councils' attitudes to rooftop hives changed? A. They have become more worried about the danger of stings. B. Their interest is now driven mainly by rules and administration. C. Urban beekeeping has expanded faster than councils can control. D. They once regarded rooftop hives as a public health issue.
Key: B. In the trial, 41 of 60 students chose C and 9 chose B. Two panel members say C is 'close enough' because the article mentions hives multiplying, and the paper goes to print in four days.
1. Work through options A to D against the sentence. What does the 41-out-of-60 result tell you about the item rather than about the students?
Read the worked answer
Option by option, against the text:
- A is contradicted, not merely unsupported. The comparative 'less to do with bee stings' explicitly downgrades the sting explanation.
- D reverses the time sequence: 'once … now' puts public health in the present, not the past.
- B restates the main clause: the shift is about 'paperwork', i.e. administration. It is the only option that survives the sentence intact.
- C is the problem. The article may say hives have multiplied, but 'faster than councils can control' adds two claims the text never makes: a rate comparison and a loss of control.
Reading the statistics: a facility of 0.15 on the key is not a cohort problem; it is an item problem. When 68% of students - including strong readers - converge on one distractor, that distractor is doing something attractive. C is attractive because it matches a widely available schema (councils are always overstretched), so the item is currently rewarding general knowledge and plausibility rather than inference from this sentence. The nine students who chose B may be the ones reading closely, which means the item is discriminating in reverse.
The second fault is the stem. 'In what way have attitudes changed?' invites a broad generalisation, which is exactly the invitation C accepts. A stem that narrows attention to the writer's own claim - for example 'According to the writer, the change in councils' approach is mainly a matter of …' - makes the text, not the world, the arbiter.
2. Your colleague argues that C is defensible because paragraph 3 says urban hives have 'multiplied'. Write the reply you would send, and supply a revised item (stem plus four options, key marked) that still tests inference.
Read the worked answer
Reply to the colleague (substance, not tone):
"I checked paragraph 3. 'Multiplied' describes the number of hives; the paragraph does not say anything about councils' capacity to police them, and the phrase 'faster than councils can control' is our wording, not the writer's. If we key C, we are asking students to import a claim. The proof is in the trial: 41 of 60 chose C, which means the item is not separating close readers from the rest. I would rather fix it now than defend it in a paper review."
Revised item:
Item 7. The writer uses the phrase 'the paperwork that follows a swarm' mainly to suggest that councils now see rooftop hives as A. a source of income from permits and licences. B. an administrative burden created by the movement of bees. C. a health hazard that has been exaggerated. D. a novelty that residents have lost interest in.
Key: B.
Why this version works: the stem now asks about the writer's purpose in a specific phrase, which is a genuine inference task. A is plausible in the real world but has no textual anchor (no money is mentioned), so it is a knowledge trap we should expect students to fall into only by guessing. C contradicts 'less to do with bee stings'. D contradicts 'once … novelty', which places loss of novelty in the wrong clause. Only B converts 'paperwork that follows a swarm' into a meaning without adding facts. It keeps the difficulty and removes the ambiguity.