Multiple choice is fine, badly written multiple choice is not

The form is not the problem. The items are.

Multiple choice attracts criticism as a shallow form and the criticism is misplaced. Well constructed items can test application and judgement; the reason most do not is that writing good items is a specific skill and it is rarely resourced.

The recurring defects are identifiable. Options of obviously different length, where the longest is correct. Distractors that are not plausible, reducing a four-option item to two. Items that test recall of a phrase from the material rather than understanding of anything. Absolutes like always and never that an alert candidate learns to eliminate.

Items testing application look different: they present a situation and ask what should be done, with distractors that represent genuine mistakes a person might make. Those are harder to write, they require somebody who knows the field, and they test something worth testing.

The other discipline is review of item performance. Any platform reporting how many candidates chose each option will identify items where everybody gets it right, everybody gets it wrong, or a distractor is never selected. All three indicate an item doing no work.

There is a further item quality worth attending to, which is the stem. A question phrased as an incomplete sentence to be finished by the option is harder to read and harder to translate, and it frequently smuggles a grammatical clue that eliminates distractors. Writing the stem as a complete question removes both problems and costs nothing.