Can students guess their way to success in an MCQ?

An MCQ with four options presents a one in four chance of ‘guessing’ the correct answer. Arguably this is no worse than a student who adopts the ‘write all you know’ approach to a problem question for which s/he can generally expect to pick up marks for correct points the marker has laboriously identified within a largely irrelevant answer. Nevertheless ‘rewarding’ guesswork (what we would call the lucky monkey syndrome) does present a problem to which there is no definitive solution, although the use of negative scoring may discourage students from equating multiple choice with multiple guess (see question 5).

More general solutions to scoring problems could include:

• raising the pass mark for the MCQ element of assessment
• making MCQs one component of the assessment strategy
• adopting mathematical strategies to ‘normalise’ the mark (see Bush, 1999)
• concentrating on using MCQs in formative situations where the ‘result’ is less important than the process

In many cases carefully designed questions that are challenging and require satisfaction of the intended learning outcomes may be sufficient to reduce the effect of the scoring problems outlined here.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010