My professor told us during our review yesterday that there was a study where they found out that test makers, unconsciously, are more likely to place the correct answer to a multiple choice question either on letter B or letter C. Well I looked at my past test papers and saw that the correct answers are more frequent in B or C than in A or D. Suppose you are answering/making a multiple choice test with choices A-D:
Where will you likely place the correct answer?
On the previous tests that you made/took, which letters are more frequent?
If you really do not have any idea what the answer is to a question, which letter would you choose?
I’ll be taking my licensure exam in a few months and I just want an idea where to place my bets in case I chance upon a question which I really do not know the answer. Thanks everyone.
Some professors do, too. If you can program a computer at all, it’s pretty easy to write a program to do this. That’s especially helpful when you have to make several different versions of a multiple-choice exam to cut down on cheating.
I was working on a question/answer shuffler that allowed some to be “locked in,” e.g. so that “all of the above” was always D. I never got around to finishing it, though.
Licensure in what? The NCLEX (required for LPN and RN licensure) is computer randomized to control for this quirk. So it’s not a good strategy for that test.
I had a teacher once who made a test where every correct answer (50 questions) except for one was choice ‘A’. It wasn’t that hard of a test but it stressed the hell out of us taking it especially when we got to the one that didn’t fit the pattern.
Ex-college prof: Only one class, a lower than low level course, had multiple choice questions. The software to select questions, etc., had a answer shuffler so I never thought about it.
On my own tests, I liked to have the first question be a set of 5 true/false sub-questions, where each and every one sounded quite plausible. Did a little randomization of order so that it wouldn’t all be trues, then falses. But I think I usually made sure the first one was true just to get things rolling.
(Then for the next couple questions I tended to make them easier so that people might start off in a hopeful mindframe.)
I have no idea who generates large multiple choice tests by hand anymore.
Hah. How can I not think of that? Of course they would probably randomize the answers. That would be practical. The test is a licensure exam after all. Why did my teacher ever told gave us that tip? Maybe it only applies to tests made by teachers for classroom use.
YAY! Congratulations! So, now you know something valuable for your future career: there are answer randomizers! So your students won’t be able to get away with cheap tricks like, “what in doubt, pick C!”
I tell my students to guess the longer answer when they are stumped on the AP exam. Mostly this is just so that they have a tie-breaker criteria so that they don’t get stressed out and waste time going back and forth between two answers in a loop, but also because I do think it’s a little more likely that the more carefully qualified answer is correct. I have noticed this trend from having read pretty much every released AP English Language test from 1983 on, most of them over and over and over again.
