The purpose of the study is to describe theoretically the principles of multiple-choice problems creation. The data come from the process of my own problem posing as well as from the analysis of problems posed by others.
I arrived at a categorisation which is based on several criteria, three of which are: the pupil's expected solving strategy; whether the pupil's abilities must be used for the solution on top of his/her mathematical knowledge; the relationship between the problem formulation and its answerchoices. The categorisation is illustrated by several problems created by the author.