Multiple Choice Tests: Strategies
Even though multiple choicer tests look pretty easy at first sight, they can be rather tough. The following strategies will help you to be more successful completing multiple-choice tests.
- Find out if credits are subtracted for answers that are wrong. If so, avoid guessing.
- Check out how much time you have to answer the questions.
- Read all the questions before you start.
- Read the entire question.
- Answer the question in your mind first before looking at the answer options.
- Read all the answer options before choosing a final answer.
- Mark the questions you may not have answered sufficiently well.
- Eliminate those answers that are clearly wrong.
- Treat each option as if this was a True-False test. Then, select the best answer.
- Answer the questions you know first, then move on to the more challenging ones.
- If you don’t know the correct answer, make an educated guess.
- Avoid ticking answers that contain the words not, sometimes, always, and never. They are more likely to be wrong.
- It’s often good to stick with your first choice – intuition works well, if everything else fails.
- The answer options will often include the the most common wrong answer that still seems logical – try to identifiy it.
- Don’t select “All of the above” answers if one option is clearly wrong.
- Don’t choose “None of the above” if one answer is definitely true.
- Don’t choose option that grammatically won’t fit with the stem.
- When there are two correct answers, “All of the above” is a good choice.
- Don’t choose options that you have never heard of.
- If the answering options contain extremely high or low numbers, avoid choosing these.
- If two answers look very much alike, one of them is likely to be true.
- If the answer options contain two opposites, one of them is probably true.
- If there is a positive option and a negative option, the positive option is a more likely answer.
- Correct options usually contain more information.
- Teachers may include nonsensical answers to make it easier for you. Exclude them.