When I took my first standardized test in elementary school, the teacher insisted how important it was that you “make your mark heavy and dark!” Don’t go outside the lines either, if you mark the wrong bubble, be sure to completely erase your mark, or you might get the question wrong! Now whenever I fill out one of those bubble sheets I try to fill the circle completely. It probably costs me time over the course of a test, though I’ve never run any kind of experiment.
If I could save myself one second on each question of a 50 question test, that’s a good chunk of time. So just how good of a job do I have to do of filling out bubble sheets? What happens if you don’t make your mark dark enough, or if there are traces of a mark on another bubble. What if more than one bubble is marked?
This is an intriguing and never-wracking question. I don’t think there is any single good answer, since it depends on the model and mainanance of each scanner.
Still - one second on each question of a 50 question test is less than a minute – not “a good chunk of time” IMHO It’s not like you have anything better to do while you’re waiting for time to be up. If completing the test in the allotted time is a serious problem for you, then you answer more slowly than someone who typically finishes “exactly on time”, and that extra minute means less, not more, than it does for them (on average, you wouldn’t be able to answer as many extra questions in that 50 seconds as they would if they fell behind for some reason)
The question then becomes: would you rather miss answering an extra question or so, or miss getting credit for questions you actually answered correctly? I’d rather get full credit for what I ‘knew’ than answer an extra question and hope that I made less than one erasure error in the test (assuming that I got that last extra question right - when I was most tired and under the most time pressure)
You ask a good question. As a practical matter, erasing can be a relaxing zen break in the midst of the test, if you take the right mental attitude.
I just drew myself a little circle, approximately the same size as bubble on an exam. I then counted “1 Mississippi” as I filled it in completely. I didn’t get to the p’s before it was done.
If you can’t satisfactorily fill in a wee circle in less than a second, maybe you should change your pencil. It is a #2 or HB, right? Non-mechanical? Or maybe you should practice your technique.
Like KP says, how well an incorrectly-marked bubble will be read totally depends on the machine. Filling in the circle as directed by the instructions is the only way to be sure you won’t lose points.