A Question of Choice

Starter Item

An article on page 42 in the Times Higher Educational Supplement of 4 February 2000, Why tests are not as simple as a, b or c, shows that the debate over multiple choice questions (MCQs) is still very much alive. This is especially so on the matter of guessing and the way in which students choose an answer to a MCQ.

Should students be encouraged to guess? I suppose it really depends on what one means by 'guessing'. At one extreme a student could make a 'blind guess' without any clue whatsoever as to what the question is all about and in a 4-choice MCQ has a 25% chance of being right. At the other extreme the student could make an 'intelligent guess' - analysing the question and through a process of intelligent deduction and elimination of the wrong choices eventually narrow down the choice to just one. In between, one may have the student who narrows down the choice to 2 options, but without being able to make any further 'intelligent guesses' simply makes a 'blind guess' but this time with a 50% chance of being right (assuming the correct answer is one of the options). I am not familiar with any studies that examine the way in which students approach MCQs, and in particular their approach towards guessing. I would suspect that most students would approach guessing by some process of 'intelligent guessing' rather than 'blind guessing' - or am I wrong? If I am right then should we really be making such a fuss about guessing in MCQs? Is not life all about making intelligent choices between a number of different courses of action?

Summary of Readers' Comments

From the discussions it is clear that there are varying opinions about guessing in MCQs and the extent to which guessing should be penalised (the assumption being a wrong answer was guessed!). There appeared to be general agreement that guessing could range from the "intelligent guess" to the "blind guess". How can the wriging or marking of MCQs take this into account?

One suggestion is to ask students to give probability ratings to those answers they guessed on. This does not solve the problem of scoring, however. Two contributors suggest questions that ask, "Which of the following is the best answer?". This would require good question writing skills - both Phil Race and Dave Farthing (see Readers'Comments) offer some useful suggestions.

Readers' Comments

For full text, see deliberations-forum archive - Feb 2000.