5 Rules (and One Secret Weapon) for Acing Multiple Choice Tests

Summary

This educational video script offers valuable strategies for acing multiple-choice tests. It advises against the common myth of 'always choose C' and instead presents evidence-based tips. These include skimming the test first to prime the brain, using the 'Hard Start, Jump to Easy' technique to engage focus mode, reading questions twice to avoid traps, and double-checking answers as you progress. It also introduces a 'secret weapon': using statistical analysis to guess when truly stuck, based on the biases in how humans write tests. The video emphasizes that these tactics should complement thorough preparation for exams.

Takeaways

• 📚 Skim the test first to get an overview and answer easy questions to prime your brain for the rest of the test.
• 🔍 Look for hints or answers to other questions within the test, as some questions may contain details relevant to others.
• 💪 Start with a difficult question to engage your brain's focus mode, then move on to easier questions to allow subconscious processing.
• 👀 Read each question twice to avoid common pitfalls like missing the word 'not' or overlooking the most correct answer among multiple correct options.
• 🔄 Double-check answers at the end of each page to catch mistakes early and reduce the chance of overlooking errors.
• 🌟 Use context-dependent memory by visualizing the learning environment to help recall information better.
• 📉 In multiple-choice questions, there's often a bias against the same letter being correct consecutively, suggesting the next likely answer.
• 📈 'All of the above' or 'none of the above' answers are correct 52% of the time, making them a good guess when stuck.
• 🎯 Use statistical insights as a last resort when you're completely unsure, not as a substitute for actual learning and preparation.
• 🛠️ The 'Tiny the Tiger' technique is a playful way to describe the strategy of alternating between difficult and easy questions to utilize both conscious and subconscious thought.
• 📈 Preparation is the most crucial aspect for success in any test, and the speaker offers a resource called 'The Ultimate Guide to Acing your Final Exams' for more effective studying.

Q & A

What is the common piece of advice often given for multiple choice tests?

The common advice is to choose option C when in doubt, a tip that seems to come from various sources including family, teachers, or the internet.

What does the speaker suggest doing first when you receive the test paper?

The speaker suggests taking a few minutes to skim through the test to get a general overview of the questions and answer any that are very easy or very familiar.

Why is skimming the test before starting beneficial?

Skimming the test helps prime the brain for the questions and details on the test, which can be useful for triggering memory and identifying potential hints or answers to other questions.

What is the 'Hard Start, Jump to Easy' technique mentioned in the script?

The 'Hard Start, Jump to Easy' technique, also humorously renamed 'Tiny the Tiger' technique, involves spending a few minutes on a difficult problem and then moving on to easier ones, allowing the subconscious to work on the difficult problem in the background.

Why is it important to read each question on the exam twice?

Reading each question twice is crucial to avoid missing key details such as 'not' or 'all of the above/none of the above', which can lead to incorrect answers if overlooked.

What is the purpose of checking answers at the end of each page instead of waiting until the end of the test?

Checking answers at the end of each page ensures that you review a smaller number of questions, reducing the chance of overlooking mistakes, and increasing the likelihood of catching errors before the test is completed.

What is context-dependent memory and how can it help with recalling information during a test?

Context-dependent memory is the phenomenon where humans are better able to remember information when they are in the same context or location where they learned it. Envisioning the learning environment can activate this type of memory and potentially help recall information during a test.

What does the speaker suggest using as a 'secret weapon' when you are completely unsure of an answer?

The speaker suggests using statistical analysis of multiple choice tests to exploit the tendencies of how humans write tests, such as the likelihood of certain answer choices being correct based on the number of options or the format of the question.

According to William Poundstone's research, what is the most common correct answer for five-answer questions?

According to Poundstone's research, the most common correct answer for five-answer questions is E, with C being the least common correct answer.

What is the speaker's final advice on the most important aspect for success in multiple choice tests?

The speaker emphasizes that the most important aspect for success in any test, including multiple choice tests, is preparation and suggests checking out 'The Ultimate Guide to Acing your Final Exams' for more effective study techniques.

Outlines

00:00

📚 Test-Taking Strategies for Multiple Choice Tests

The paragraph introduces a video script that aims to provide well-founded advice for acing multiple choice tests. It suggests that the common advice of 'choose C when in doubt' is not as reliable as other strategies. The speaker proposes five main strategies and a 'secret weapon' to tackle such tests effectively. The first strategy is to skim through the test to get an overview and answer easy questions first, which primes the brain for harder questions. It also highlights the possibility of finding hints or answers to other questions within the test itself, emphasizing the importance of not just linearly answering questions.

05:01

🔍 Advanced Techniques for Multiple Choice Success

This paragraph delves into more advanced test-taking techniques. It introduces the 'Hard Start, Jump to Easy' technique, which involves spending a few minutes on a difficult question before moving on, engaging the brain's focus mode and allowing the subconscious to work on the problem. The paragraph also stresses the importance of reading each question twice to avoid common pitfalls like missing the word 'not' or choosing the most familiar-looking answer. Additionally, it suggests double-checking answers at the end of each page to reduce the chance of overlooking mistakes. The speaker also discusses the use of context-dependent memory to recall information by envisioning the learning environment. Lastly, it introduces statistical insights from William Poundstone's research, which can be used as a 'secret weapon' when all else fails, such as biases in answer choices and the tendency for questions to alternate answers.

Keywords

💡Multiple Choice Tests

Multiple choice tests are a common form of assessment that present a question followed by a list of possible answers, from which the test-taker must select the correct one. In the video, the main theme revolves around strategies to improve performance on these types of tests, highlighting the common myth about choosing 'C' when in doubt and providing evidence-based techniques for tackling them effectively.

💡Priming the Brain

Priming the brain refers to the process of preparing the mind for a particular task or type of thinking. In the context of the video, it is suggested that skimming the test first can prime the brain to recognize patterns or details that may be useful for answering subsequent questions, thus enhancing overall test performance.

💡Hard Start, Jump to Easy Technique

This technique, also humorously renamed as 'Tiny the Tiger' technique in the video, involves initially tackling a difficult question to engage the brain's focus mode before moving on to easier questions. The video explains that this approach not only saves time but also allows the subconscious to work on the difficult problem in the background, potentially leading to a solution upon revisiting it.

💡Focus Mode

Focus mode is a state of concentration where conscious resources are directed towards solving a specific problem. The video emphasizes the importance of engaging focus mode when initially attempting a difficult question on a multiple choice test, as it activates the brain's problem-solving capabilities before switching to other questions.

💡Context-Dependent Memory

Context-dependent memory is a psychological phenomenon where the ability to recall information is enhanced when in the same context or environment where the information was originally learned. The video suggests using this concept to help recall answers to test questions by envisioning the study environment, which can potentially activate related memories.

💡Statistical Analysis

Statistical analysis in the video pertains to the examination of patterns and biases in the distribution of correct answers across multiple choice questions. The video references research by William Poundstone, which found that certain letters are more likely to be correct answers depending on the number of options provided, offering a 'secret weapon' for when test-takers are unsure of an answer.

💡True/False Questions

True/false questions are a type of question that requires the test-taker to determine if a statement is correct or incorrect. The video reveals a bias towards 'true' answers being more likely correct based on statistical analysis, providing a strategy for guessing when unsure.

💡All of the Above/None of the Above

These are specific answer options that can be used in multiple choice questions to indicate that all or none of the provided individual options are correct, respectively. The video suggests that such answers are correct more often than not, offering a strategic approach for guessing when faced with difficult questions.

💡Preparation

Preparation is highlighted as the most crucial aspect for success on any test, including multiple choice tests. The video emphasizes that while the provided techniques are helpful, thorough preparation is essential for effectively answering questions and not relying solely on guessing strategies.

💡The Ultimate Guide to Acing your Final Exams

This is a resource mentioned in the video that is designed to help students prepare more effectively for their exams. It compiles various tips and strategies related to exam preparation, indicating the creator's commitment to providing comprehensive study guidance beyond the scope of the video.

Highlights

Common advice 'When in doubt, choose C' is often misleading and should be independently verified.

Begin test-taking by skimming the questions to get an overview and answer easy ones first to prime your brain.

Multiple-choice tests may have interrelated questions that can provide hints or answers for each other.

The 'Hard Start, Jump to Easy' technique engages the brain's focus mode and allows subconscious processing of difficult problems.

Reading each question twice helps avoid common pitfalls such as missing the word 'not' or choosing the most familiar-looking answer.

Double-checking answers at the end of each page can prevent overlooking mistakes due to fewer questions left to review.

Venerating the place where information was learned can activate context-dependent memory and help recall.

When all else fails, statistical analysis of multiple-choice tests can provide insights on the most likely correct answers.

For three-answer questions, there is no bias; for four-answer questions, B is slightly more likely to be correct.

In five-answer questions, E is the most common correct answer, and C is the least likely.

True answers are more likely to be correct in true/false questions, with a 56% occurrence rate.

Questions are less likely to have the same answer as the one preceding them, suggesting a bias towards variety.

All of the above or none of the above answers are correct 52% of the time, making them a good guess when stuck.

Statistical insights should be a last resort and not replace understanding and preparation for tests.

The presenter offers a resource called 'The Ultimate Guide to Acing your Final Exams' for more effective test preparation.

Engagement with the video through likes and subscriptions is encouraged, along with sharing additional test-taking tips in the comments.

A recommended video on 'confidence tracking' is suggested for further increasing scores on multiple-choice tests.

Transcripts

When it comes to taking multiple choice tests,

there's this common piece of advice that

often gets thrown around.

"When in doubt, always choose C."

Right?

Or maybe for you it was B 'cause this advice

comes from everywhere.

Maybe you heard it from your dad or your teacher

or you read it on the internet.

I'm pretty sure that I heard it from some kid

in my eighth grade history class named Jimmy,

but as Abraham Lincoln once didn't say,

"Always independently verify advice given to you

"by eighth graders named Jimmy."

Truer words have never not been said.

So today we are gonna go over some more well-founded

and useful advice that you can use to make sure you ace

that next multiple choice test you got coming up

in the future.

And I've got five main strategies to go through as well as

one secret weapon of sorts, so let's just get started.

First off, when those test papers flutter down to your desk,

don't just start immediately going through the questions

one by one in a linear fashion.

Instead, take a few minutes to go through and skim the test

and just get a general overview of the questions.

Now, as you're doing this, you can answer any

of the questions that stand out as really, really easy

or that you're really, really confident in,

but another thing you're doing by doing this whole little

skim once over the test before you actually start in earnest

is you're priming your brain for some of the questions

and details that are on the test as a whole.

And this can be really, really useful

for a couple of different reasons.

One, you're priming your brain to start thinking

about some of the harder questions and we're gonna get

to that in a minute, but number two, sometimes multiple

choice tests will have questions that hold details

and hints or sometimes outright full answers

to other questions on the test.

For example, say you're taking a history test one day

and you come across a question like this.

Which American president's death caused Napoleon

to order 10 days of mourning in France?

Now, as you're going over the answers, you can eliminate

one of them right off the bat, but the other ones,

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington,

you don't know which of the three is the correct answer.

So maybe you skip it, you go on into the test

and then later, you come across a question like,

true or false.

Even though Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were bitter

political rivals during the heyday of their careers,

they eventually regained their friendship

and kept it until both of their deaths in 1826.

Now that question just established that Thomas Jefferson

and John Adams both died in 1826 and say that you knew

from some other source that Napoleon himself

had died in 1821.

If you knew that, then that question answers the previous

question because both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams

are not possible answers, therefore, it's Washington.

These kind of details and questions aren't always

gonna crop up in your tests, and in any case,

you probably shouldn't waste a whole ton of your test time

digging around for 'em because, you know,

preparation is a much better strategy.

You should hopefully come into the test prepared

to answer most the questions in the first place,

but it can be helpful in certain occasions,

so just prime your brain with a little bit

of a preliminary pass before you start in earnest.

The second technique on my list is what Barbara Oakley's

book A Mind for Numbers calls the Hard Start,

Jump to Easy technique.

And this is a technique where, basically, you jump

into a difficult problem and you spend a couple of minutes

thinking really deeply about it, but if you can't

get the answer to that problem, you move on.

Now this is something you're teachers have probably

told you in the past, just to save time on your tests,

but there's another benefit that they

might not have told you about.

If you spend some time thinking about a hard problem,

you're engaging your brain's focus mode.

And I know this focus and diffused dichotomy

is something I talk about a lot in these videos,

but it's really, really important.

So while you're using focus mode, you are concentrating

on the problem and you're using your conscious resources

to try to solve it.

But once you jump into a different problem,

your subconscious resources, the more distributed parts

of your brain, work on that difficult problem

in the background.

And then when you go back to the problem a little bit later,

you probably have a better chance of answering it.

Oh, and my apologies to Dr. Oakley, but we have got

to get a better name than Hard Start,

Jump to Easy technique.

So I'm gonna go ahead and recoin it the Tiny the Tiger

technique 'cause it's like that one boss battle

in Crash Warped where you spend some time fighting the boss

and then you switch over to avoid these tigers

and go back and forth from there.

Tip number three is to make sure that you read each question

on your exam twice.

Doing this is really, really important because multiple

choice questions can be tricky and because they have

a limited number of answers and those answers are just

written out for you, it can be really tempting to simply

skim over the question very quickly and then go

to the answer that looks most familiar.

But professors can be pretty sneaky when they're writing

these kinds of questions, so you need to watch out

for a few things that can trip you up.

For example, some of the questions on your exams

might ask you which of the following is not X, Y or Z.

And it can be really easy to fail to see that word, not,

if you're going through really fast and just

skimming the questions.

Other questions might actually have more than one

correct answer and your job there will be to find

the answer that is most correct.

And of course, in that vein, there are also all sorts

of questions that have all of the above or none of the above

as potential answers and I am not too proud to admit that

in several classes during my college career, I took tests

very quickly and failed to see these types of answers

on a few questions, which I, of course, got wrong.

Tip number four is a tactic that I found personally useful

all throughout high school and college and it's to double

check your answers as you get to the end of each page

of your test instead of just waiting

to do it all at the end.

And the reason this is so useful is that once you get

to the end of a page on your test, you probably only have

five or 10 questions to go over and because you have so few,

you're probably not gonna rush or get intimidated

by the number of questions you have to check

and that's gonna decrease the likelihood that you'll skip

over a dumb mistake or something that just should glaringly

stick out and that's gonna increase your scores.

Now this is not a replacement for giving your test

a good once-over once you've finished it.

And I definitely think you should be budgeting time

at the outset of the test to do that, but by adding

this technique into your test-taking arsenal,

you can increase your scores even more.

Alright, let's move on to tip number five here.

So if you come across a question that you just

can't get the answer to, or maybe you feel like the answer's

on the tip of your tongue, but you just can't quite get it,

try to envision yourself in the room

in which you learned that piece of information.

Maybe it was your classroom, maybe it was your normal

study spot, but either way, science has shown that if you

can envision the area where you learned something,

it activates something called context-dependent memory.

Basically, humans are more able to remember things

when they're in the context or location in which they

learned them, but research done in 1984 showed that if

people simply envisioned the place in which they learned

something, they can sort of, channel some of that ability

even though they're not physically in that room.

Now, if even that doesn't work, or maybe you've run across

a question where you just absolutely have no clue what the

answer is, you've never seen it before or you just can't

eliminate any of the choices whatsoever, well,

it's time to break out that secret weapon.

So, remember our friend Jimmy who gave us

that old advice, you know, "When in doubt, pick C?"

Well, yeah, Jimmy was wrong, but that's okay,

because instead of following some dumb rule

or just randomly guessing, you can actually use statistics

to exploit the way in which human beings

typically write multiple choice tests.

And that's because, as the author William Poundstone

points out in his book Rock Breaks Scissors,

humans are pretty bad at creating

actual random distributions of answers.

During his research, Poundstone collected

over a hundred multiple choice tests

from all sorts of different sources.

Schools, colleges, drivers exams,

online quizzes, you name it, he got it.

And that totaled over 2,400 questions.

And what he learned from doing statistical analysis

on all those questions was pretty surprising.

First off, he did discover biases for individual

letter answers, but those biases changed based

on how many answers were available on the question.

For three answer questions, you know, A, B, C,

there was no bias.

And for four answer questions, the bias turned out to be B,

not C, though it was a very statistically small advantage.

28% versus the expected 25%.

And then, when we go over to five answer questions,

you know, A through E, it was actually E that was the most

common answer and C was the least commonly right answer.

Those findings are just the type of the iceberg though,

and personally, I find them far less interesting

than all the other things he discovered.

Including the fact that with true/false questions,

there's a definite bias toward true answers being correct.

In his research, 56% of the time,

true was the correct answer and only 44% of the time

was false the correct answer.

Even more interesting and potentially useful to you

is the fact that a question has a higher than average

likelihood of not having the same answer

as the question that came before it.

So if you have one question on a test where you knew

the answer was C, you're definitely sure of that,

and then you move on to the next question and you're stuck,

or maybe you've narrowed it down to C or D,

then it's likely that D is the answer, not C.

And perhaps most astoundingly, for questions that had either

an all of the above or none of the above answer present,

that answer was correct 52% of the time, which means

that if you're stuck on a question and you can't

narrow it down, that answer's your best bet.

Now even though I had fun calling these findings

a "secret weapon" of sorts, I really want to emphasize

that you should only use them when you're completely

at a loss and you have to take a shot in the dark.

You should use every other technique in the book

to narrow things down, to give yourself some space,

to use that Tiny the Tiger technique because,

at the end of the day, all you're doing

is exploiting the way that people write tests.

You're not actually learning anything and you're not

actually using your mental faculties to work

with the actual information and content of the exam.

Anyway, beyond all the tips in this video,

the most important aspect to your success on any multiple

choice test or any kind of test at all is preparation.

And if you want to learn how to prepare for your tests

more effectively, I actually just put together a resource

on my website called The Ultimate Guide

to Acing your Final Exams.

And it collects everything that I've ever made

related to exams, so if you haven't seen all those videos

or you're looking for a specific tip, you might wanna

check it out and you can find it on the card on the screen

right now or in the description down below.

Beyond that, if you enjoyed this video,

you can give it a like to support this channel,

it's much appreciated, and if you have additional tips

on acing your multiple choice tests that I didn't talk about

right here, I would love to hear from you

down in the comments below.

If you wanna subscribe to this channel and get new videos

on being a more effective student every single week,

click right there and you can also click right there

if you want to get a free copy of my book

on earning better grades.

Now the recommended video this week is actually

something related to this because it's about a technique

called confidence tracking that can help you even further

increase your scores on multiple choice tests,

so check it out.