Answering Multiple Choice Questions
Supplemental Instruction by Ms. Andrea Haymond-Tang
The information available through this site is inteded to assist students in becoming effective and efficient learners. The pages were adapted from material presetned at two websites: www.academictips.org and www.studygs.net. If you are interested in obtaining additional help, you might visit either of those two sites or perhaps two others: www.studyguidezone.com/resource_tips.htm and www.studytips.org.
General Exam TipsAnswering Multiple Choice Questions
Answering True-False Questions
Answering Essay Questions
Answering Short Answer Questions
Taking Open Book Exams
Preparing for Emergency Exams
Coping with Test Anxiety
Note Taking Strategies
Active Listening
Answering Multiple Choice Questions
Strategies:1. Read the directions carefully.
2. Know if each question has one or more correct choices.
3. Find out if you are penalized for guessing.
4. Always answer the easy questions first.
5. Break each question into the stem and the answer options. Get an understanding of the stem before looking at and choosing an answer.
6. If you run into vague terms and the instructor is no help with defining them, define them in your own words.
7. Don't jump the gun with your answer. You have to select not only a correct answer, but the best answer. Therefore, it is important that you read all of the options and not simply stop when you come to the first one that seems likely.
8. Think about what the correct answer is and then look for it among the options.
9. Eliminate the options you know are incorrect.
10. Look at each question as if it were a true/false question. Choose the "most true" option.
11. Be skeptical of questions that:
- are completely unfamiliar to you.
- don't fit with the question stem in a grammatically correct way.
- contain negative or absolute words.
12. You are required to select a technically correct answer, but also the one that is most completely correct. Because phrases like "all of the above" and "none of the above" are very inclusive, when these options are used, they typically are more often the correct answer than would be predicted by chance alone. If you know that two or three of the options seem correct, odds are that "all of the above" is the correct option. Or if you know that two or three of the options seem wrong, odds are that "none of the above" is the correct option.
13. Be wary of choices that include statements such as "never, always, guarantees, insures", etc. These kind of statements are very restricted and hard to defend. Although they are occasionally the correct answer, this is rarely the case.
14. Other statements such as "may sometimes be, can occasionally result in" are typically carefully qualified, conservative, and guarded. These statements tend to be correct more often than would be predicted by chance alone, so with all else equal, favor these answer options.
15. Be skeptical of choices that are unusually long or full of jargon. These are usually decoys.
16. Exercise your knowledge of common prefixes, suffixes, and word roots to make intelligent guesses about terms that you don't know.
17. Be aware of give-aways in the grammatical structure. If a question stem ends with "an", then the correct choice would have to start with a vowel. Also look for agreement of subjects and verbs.
18. Use information and insights that you have acquired while working through the entire exam to go back and answer earlier items that you weren't sure of. Sometimes a later question will contain the answer for a previous question.
19. If two answer options are opposite of each other, one of them is probably the correct answer.
20. Sometimes two options look very similar to each other. In this case, one of them is probably the correct answer. Try to identify what is different about them and choose the best one. If you can't figure out what is different about them, they probably cancel each other out and are both wrong.
21. If you aren't positive of an answer and there is no penalty for guessing, guess. But be methodical about it. Eliminate the choices you know are wrong, and then relate the remaining choices back to the stem of the question. Read the question stem and each possible answer choice altogether to see how well it fits. Compare possible choices and determine how they are different. Then make an informed guess. If there is a penalty for guessing, don't guess.
22. Studies have shown that when students change their answers, they tend to change them to an incorrect choice. Therefore, if you are fairly sure you were correct the first time, stick with that choice.
23. Of course, the best way to be sure of correct answers is to know the material and be sufficiently prepared.