In this lecture we'll talk about multiple choice questions and how to attack these questions for success. multiple choice questions are likely the most common type of question you're going to encounter on any exam throughout high school, college, etc. The strategies we'll talk about in this lecture are the following. And I'll explain these in detail. Travel in one direction. No time travels allowed.

Minimize marking, on contemplating change, using the leftover, proportionate planning, and finally, move. Travel in one direction implies that you'll start at the beginning of the test and work your way towards the back of the test or the section of the test for the a lot of time. A lot of students stumble and jump around, skip around, maybe they do 10 questions, get stuck on a few and then skip maybe to the back of the test and work backwards. This is an inefficient use of time and often leaves questions unanswered and leaves points on the proverbial table. Do not skip forward or skip around because this interrupts the flow and you if you've been there, you know what I'm talking about flow is a valid concept. It's a it's a psychology concept.

Basically, getting into the groove would be another way to frame that. And you know, when you've hit your stride when you've hit your flow, you feel like the answers are clicking, you're moving from question to question quickly, and you're recalling what you need to do for success. So by keeping the flow in one direction, you're more likely to get into your proverbial mental stride. No time travels allowed us is basically about skipping around. Often when you skip questions, you may end up omitting questions and not answering them, which just sort of shoot yourself in the foot. It's better to guess at a question and have at least a chance of getting it right than to miss it altogether or fail to answer it.

There is no penalty for guessing students often. Forget that and some students for whatever reason, self private Whatever, don't mark an answer because they don't want to put down something stupid, but really don't skip any questions. jumping around wastes time and creates a lot of extra mental work, you get the end of the exam, you have to go back and try and sort through the answers and make sure that you've answered them all. Or look through your little old dots or, or computerized for whoever you're doing the test to see what you've actually missed in what you haven't. Minimize marking questions that you are unsure about, or maybe you just want to go back and double check a calculation. Those are fine to mark.

It's a method to use to double check your answers in your work but try to keep it to a minimum. This common stumbling block is to excessively Mark questions and basically creates a lot of mental work. And for some, it delays the actual answering process. They may say the student may say to themselves, well, I'm just gonna just put something down and I'll go back and actually think about a little bit more in the second pass, only to run out of time. really missed out on the opportunity to try and answer the question correctly the first time. So try to keep it to a minimum.

You can use it to prevent yourself from getting stuck. Don't waste five minutes on a question only to run out of time to answer to complete the exam. And remember, you must answer anyways, before moving on, I always mark an answer for a question no matter what, before you move on to the next. contemplating change. I've talked about this in previous lectures. The first answer is generally correct, really shouldn't change unless you have clear evidence to support that the new answer is correct.

Or has a higher probability of being correct over what you already marked down. trust your gut. There is some controversy around this and some data that suggests that students may be able to change to correct answer more often than not, it's one of those myths versus realities. But in my experience, in this in helping students and my own test taking experience, I still think that going with the gut is Probably the best choice, it's more, most likely the answer you came up with the first go around is probably correct, or something else that you can try. Using the leftover time, go ahead and start back at the beginning and only review the mark questions. Don't try and review the entire exam, you're going to run out of time.

And you're not going to be able to get through all the marked questions that you wanted to go back and double check or review and again, caution about changing as I talked about on the previous slide, proportionate planning. When you sit down with an exam, you'll know how many questions are there and how much time is available, you can roughly calculate how much time per question or how much time per section. Obviously more complicated questions are those that require calculations or the the two parter and three Potter's partners that have very long stems take more time. But the key is to come up with a rough timeframe about how long you think you should spend on questions you can pace yourself so if you look at the clock the midway point and you should be proportionately midway through the exam. And don't dwell on questions just just keep going.

Which brings me to the one of the final strategies move statistical analysis shows that as the amount of time spent answering a question increases, the likelihood of getting that question wrong also increases in this is boils down to knowing versus not knowing the material or the question. If you're if you're spending a ton of time trying to figure out a question, try to come up with the answer. Probably just guess and move on. Keep moving forward. Don't Don't spoil an exam because of a few complicated questions that were probably put there by the test writer on purpose to really test not only the knowledge base of the students to weed or separate out those with the motivation, willpower and higher level to achieve, but just just keep going. If you don't know questions, go ahead and pick your favorite letter as covered in a previous lecture.

B and D are statistically probably the better choices, particularly if you haven't looked at the question, and it's a true and false questions C and D are bad answers. So b is probably the best. Push the negative thoughts from your mind. Obviously, it's discouraging when you're taking an exam. And you might feel like you don't know a lot of the questions and you're feeling like you're already calculating your grade mentally in your mind, which is allowing negative thoughts to cloud your judgment and and to disrupt your flow. And when you're guessing, don't look for patterns.

I've seen students use their best guess try to apply some of the rules I've taught in previous lectures, and they end up with a whole string of letter B, or C or D or whatever, in a row. And then they just randomly go back and erase a few of them and change them to a different letter without even looking at the question or why they pick that because they're worried that that they developed a pattern in their answers, that's for sure got to be wrong. So. So that's it for this, this segment on multiple choice questions, strategies. There is a The second section on another method of answering multiple choice questions that we'll cover in a separate lecture.