Preparing for and Taking Multiple-Choice Tests
Excerpts from Professor Ken Keith’s Tips for Test Taking: Multiple Choice and Short Answer Exams
By Professor Ken Keith, Department of Psychology
Multiple-Choice Exams
• What are they? You are presented with a single question and several potential responses or answers (the correct answer and several incorrect ones). Your task is to choose the correct answer from this array.
• How do I prepare? Students often believe multiple-choice exams are easy, and thus do not require as much preparation as other types of exams. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although you can be sure the right answer is right there in front of you, there will also be several other (wrong) possibilities as well—and of course studies show that students who guess, while getting some answers right, do not do as well as students who have done the reading, attended class, taken notes, and in general prepared well. There is no substitute for doing the work demanded by the course.
What strategies will help during a multiple choice test?
Researchers agree on several key test-taking approaches that will produce improved results on multiple-choice exams:
• Read the question (including every option).
This seems obvious, but it is not unusual for students to quickly scan a question, see a familiar word or concept, choose it, and be wrong. This can happen if careless reading causes you to overlook a negative (“not,” “never,” “un-”, etc.) or some other grammatical characteristic that changes the meaning of the question.
• If you know the answer, compare that answer to all the other options, to be sure you are right.
• Compare options to the question’s stem.
Sometimes, incorrect options will not match the stem, grammatically or conceptually. This strategy can help you narrow the possible correct options. Strategies that help you narrow the choices will make guessing more profitable, even if you aren’t sure of the answer.
• Don’t waste valuable time on a question you can’t answer.
If you aren’t sure of an answer, move on and come back to it later if you have time. Spending too much time on a single question may cost you opportunity to answer others that you can actually answer.
• Remember that multiple-choice exams rely on recognition memory.
The correct answer really is there; don’t over-interpret, read into the options material that really isn’t there, or otherwise talk yourself out of choosing the right answer.
• Pay attention to the logic of the question.
You will often see qualifying words in multiple-choice questions—words like “never,” “always,” “many,” “sometimes,” “more,” and the like. These may be clues to the right answer. Thus, if you know that a particular statement is “sometimes” true, but one of the possible answers uses the word “never,” you can be certain this is not the correct answer.
• Trust your own good judgment and style.
Don’t try to “game” the test, by assuming the instructor wouldn’t use choice “B” three times in a row, or that an answer like “all of the above” will always be correct. If you are prepared and know the answer, trust your own knowledge.