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5 Rules (and One Secret Weapon) for Acing Multiple Choice Tests - YouTube
Channel: Thomas Frank
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When it comes to taking
multiple choice tests,
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there's this common piece of advice that
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often gets thrown around.
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"When in doubt, always choose C."
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Right?
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Or maybe for you it was
B 'cause this advice
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comes from everywhere.
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Maybe you heard it from
your dad or your teacher
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or you read it on the internet.
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I'm pretty sure that I
heard it from some kid
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in my eighth grade
history class named Jimmy,
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but as Abraham Lincoln once didn't say,
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"Always independently
verify advice given to you
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"by eighth graders named Jimmy."
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Truer words have never not been said.
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So today we are gonna go
over some more well-founded
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and useful advice that you
can use to make sure you ace
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that next multiple choice
test you got coming up
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in the future.
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And I've got five main strategies
to go through as well as
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one secret weapon of sorts,
so let's just get started.
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First off, when those test
papers flutter down to your desk,
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don't just start immediately
going through the questions
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one by one in a linear fashion.
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Instead, take a few minutes to
go through and skim the test
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and just get a general
overview of the questions.
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Now, as you're doing
this, you can answer any
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of the questions that stand
out as really, really easy
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or that you're really,
really confident in,
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but another thing you're doing
by doing this whole little
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skim once over the test before
you actually start in earnest
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is you're priming your brain
for some of the questions
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and details that are
on the test as a whole.
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And this can be really, really useful
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for a couple of different reasons.
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One, you're priming your
brain to start thinking
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about some of the harder
questions and we're gonna get
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to that in a minute, but
number two, sometimes multiple
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choice tests will have
questions that hold details
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and hints or sometimes
outright full answers
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to other questions on the test.
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For example, say you're
taking a history test one day
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and you come across a question like this.
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Which American president's
death caused Napoleon
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to order 10 days of mourning in France?
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Now, as you're going over the
answers, you can eliminate
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one of them right off the
bat, but the other ones,
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Thomas Jefferson, John
Adams, George Washington,
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you don't know which of the
three is the correct answer.
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So maybe you skip it,
you go on into the test
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and then later, you come
across a question like,
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true or false.
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Even though Thomas Jefferson
and John Adams were bitter
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political rivals during the
heyday of their careers,
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they eventually regained their friendship
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and kept it until both
of their deaths in 1826.
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Now that question just
established that Thomas Jefferson
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and John Adams both died in
1826 and say that you knew
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from some other source
that Napoleon himself
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had died in 1821.
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If you knew that, then that
question answers the previous
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question because both Thomas
Jefferson and John Adams
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are not possible answers,
therefore, it's Washington.
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These kind of details and
questions aren't always
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gonna crop up in your
tests, and in any case,
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you probably shouldn't waste
a whole ton of your test time
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digging around for 'em because, you know,
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preparation is a much better strategy.
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You should hopefully come
into the test prepared
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to answer most the questions
in the first place,
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but it can be helpful
in certain occasions,
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so just prime your brain with a little bit
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of a preliminary pass
before you start in earnest.
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The second technique on my
list is what Barbara Oakley's
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book A Mind for Numbers
calls the Hard Start,
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Jump to Easy technique.
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And this is a technique
where, basically, you jump
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into a difficult problem and
you spend a couple of minutes
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thinking really deeply
about it, but if you can't
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get the answer to that
problem, you move on.
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Now this is something you're
teachers have probably
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told you in the past, just
to save time on your tests,
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but there's another benefit that they
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might not have told you about.
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If you spend some time
thinking about a hard problem,
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you're engaging your brain's focus mode.
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And I know this focus
and diffused dichotomy
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is something I talk about
a lot in these videos,
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but it's really, really important.
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So while you're using focus
mode, you are concentrating
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on the problem and you're
using your conscious resources
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to try to solve it.
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But once you jump into
a different problem,
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your subconscious resources,
the more distributed parts
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of your brain, work on
that difficult problem
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in the background.
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And then when you go back to
the problem a little bit later,
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you probably have a better
chance of answering it.
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Oh, and my apologies to
Dr. Oakley, but we have got
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to get a better name than Hard Start,
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Jump to Easy technique.
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So I'm gonna go ahead and
recoin it the Tiny the Tiger
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technique 'cause it's
like that one boss battle
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in Crash Warped where you spend
some time fighting the boss
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and then you switch over
to avoid these tigers
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and go back and forth from there.
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Tip number three is to make
sure that you read each question
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on your exam twice.
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Doing this is really, really
important because multiple
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choice questions can be
tricky and because they have
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a limited number of answers
and those answers are just
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written out for you, it can
be really tempting to simply
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skim over the question
very quickly and then go
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to the answer that looks most familiar.
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But professors can be pretty
sneaky when they're writing
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these kinds of questions,
so you need to watch out
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for a few things that can trip you up.
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For example, some of the
questions on your exams
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might ask you which of the
following is not X, Y or Z.
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And it can be really easy to
fail to see that word, not,
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if you're going through
really fast and just
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skimming the questions.
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Other questions might
actually have more than one
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correct answer and your
job there will be to find
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the answer that is most correct.
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And of course, in that vein,
there are also all sorts
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of questions that have all of
the above or none of the above
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as potential answers and I am
not too proud to admit that
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in several classes during my
college career, I took tests
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very quickly and failed to
see these types of answers
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on a few questions, which
I, of course, got wrong.
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Tip number four is a tactic
that I found personally useful
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all throughout high school
and college and it's to double
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check your answers as you
get to the end of each page
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of your test instead of just waiting
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to do it all at the end.
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And the reason this is so
useful is that once you get
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to the end of a page on your
test, you probably only have
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five or 10 questions to go over
and because you have so few,
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you're probably not gonna
rush or get intimidated
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by the number of questions
you have to check
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and that's gonna decrease the
likelihood that you'll skip
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over a dumb mistake or something
that just should glaringly
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stick out and that's gonna
increase your scores.
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Now this is not a replacement
for giving your test
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a good once-over once you've finished it.
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And I definitely think you
should be budgeting time
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at the outset of the test
to do that, but by adding
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this technique into your
test-taking arsenal,
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you can increase your scores even more.
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Alright, let's move on
to tip number five here.
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So if you come across a
question that you just
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can't get the answer to, or
maybe you feel like the answer's
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on the tip of your tongue, but
you just can't quite get it,
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try to envision yourself in the room
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in which you learned that
piece of information.
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Maybe it was your classroom,
maybe it was your normal
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study spot, but either way,
science has shown that if you
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can envision the area where
you learned something,
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it activates something called
context-dependent memory.
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Basically, humans are more
able to remember things
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when they're in the context
or location in which they
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learned them, but research
done in 1984 showed that if
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people simply envisioned the
place in which they learned
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something, they can sort of,
channel some of that ability
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even though they're not
physically in that room.
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Now, if even that doesn't work,
or maybe you've run across
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a question where you just
absolutely have no clue what the
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answer is, you've never seen
it before or you just can't
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eliminate any of the
choices whatsoever, well,
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it's time to break out that secret weapon.
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So, remember our friend Jimmy who gave us
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that old advice, you know,
"When in doubt, pick C?"
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Well, yeah, Jimmy was
wrong, but that's okay,
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because instead of
following some dumb rule
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or just randomly guessing, you
can actually use statistics
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to exploit the way in which human beings
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typically write multiple choice tests.
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And that's because, as the
author William Poundstone
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points out in his book
Rock Breaks Scissors,
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humans are pretty bad at creating
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actual random distributions of answers.
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During his research, Poundstone collected
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over a hundred multiple choice tests
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from all sorts of different sources.
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Schools, colleges, drivers exams,
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online quizzes, you name it, he got it.
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And that totaled over 2,400 questions.
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And what he learned from
doing statistical analysis
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on all those questions
was pretty surprising.
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First off, he did discover
biases for individual
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letter answers, but those
biases changed based
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on how many answers were
available on the question.
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For three answer questions,
you know, A, B, C,
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there was no bias.
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And for four answer questions,
the bias turned out to be B,
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not C, though it was a very
statistically small advantage.
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28% versus the expected 25%.
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And then, when we go over
to five answer questions,
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you know, A through E, it was
actually E that was the most
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common answer and C was the
least commonly right answer.
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Those findings are just the
type of the iceberg though,
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and personally, I find
them far less interesting
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than all the other things he discovered.
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Including the fact that
with true/false questions,
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there's a definite bias toward
true answers being correct.
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In his research, 56% of the time,
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true was the correct answer
and only 44% of the time
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was false the correct answer.
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Even more interesting and
potentially useful to you
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is the fact that a question
has a higher than average
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likelihood of not having the same answer
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as the question that came before it.
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So if you have one question
on a test where you knew
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the answer was C, you're
definitely sure of that,
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and then you move on to the
next question and you're stuck,
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or maybe you've narrowed
it down to C or D,
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then it's likely that
D is the answer, not C.
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And perhaps most astoundingly,
for questions that had either
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an all of the above or none
of the above answer present,
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that answer was correct 52%
of the time, which means
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that if you're stuck on
a question and you can't
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narrow it down, that
answer's your best bet.
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Now even though I had fun
calling these findings
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a "secret weapon" of sorts,
I really want to emphasize
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that you should only use
them when you're completely
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at a loss and you have to
take a shot in the dark.
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You should use every other
technique in the book
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to narrow things down, to
give yourself some space,
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to use that Tiny the
Tiger technique because,
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at the end of the day, all you're doing
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is exploiting the way
that people write tests.
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You're not actually learning
anything and you're not
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actually using your
mental faculties to work
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with the actual information
and content of the exam.
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Anyway, beyond all the tips in this video,
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the most important aspect to
your success on any multiple
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choice test or any kind of
test at all is preparation.
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And if you want to learn how
to prepare for your tests
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more effectively, I actually
just put together a resource
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on my website called The Ultimate Guide
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to Acing your Final Exams.
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And it collects everything
that I've ever made
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related to exams, so if you
haven't seen all those videos
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or you're looking for a
specific tip, you might wanna
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check it out and you can find
it on the card on the screen
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right now or in the
description down below.
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Beyond that, if you enjoyed this video,
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you can give it a like
to support this channel,
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it's much appreciated, and
if you have additional tips
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on acing your multiple choice
tests that I didn't talk about
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right here, I would love to hear from you
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down in the comments below.
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If you wanna subscribe to this
channel and get new videos
[563]
on being a more effective
student every single week,
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click right there and you
can also click right there
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if you want to get a free copy of my book
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on earning better grades.
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Now the recommended video
this week is actually
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something related to this
because it's about a technique
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called confidence tracking
that can help you even further
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increase your scores on
multiple choice tests,
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so check it out.
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