Abstract:
There are many kinds of test than often used to evaluate students’ achievement.
Multiple choice tests are often used to evaluate the students’ achievement because it is
considered as the most effective test, mainly in scoring, but also has more weakness,
mainly in measuring the exact ability of the students, because the result of the test
sometimes cannot describe whether the students really understand the questions or just
answer them without any reason. Our educational wisdom considers using essay test to
evaluate the students’ achievement, is better than multiple choice test.
The aim of this research is to know whether there is any significant difference of
students’ achievement on reading comprehension between essay test and multiple choice
test at the eleventh grade of MA Padureso, Kebumen in the academic year 2012/2013.
The reseacher applies a descriptive quantitative research in conducting the reseach. In this
research, the researcher took 31 students from the total number of 63 of the eleventh
grade students of MA Padureso, Kebumen to do the test. For this research, the researcher
used random sampling because every class in population is given by same opportunity to
be assigned as member of sample. The researcher uses essay test and multiple choice test.
The essay test consists of 10 items and the multiple choice test consists of 30 items to get
the data. The researcher calculated both manually and by using SPSS program version 17.
The result of this research shows that there is any significant difference of
students’ achievement on reading comprehension between using essay test and multiple
choice test. It was found that the result of t-value 5.419. Based on the 0.05 significant
level, the value of t-table is 2.042, the computation shows that t-value is higher that is
5.419>2.042. However, if it is seen from both the students’ achievement, the mean score
of the students’ achievement using essay test is higher than the mean score of the
students’ achievement using multiple choice test in reading comprehension
(74.00>64.84). So, the conclusion is the better students’ achievement in reading
comprehension is using essay test than using multiple choice test.
