By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel

Imagine you are taking a multiple-choice test with a range of different questions on it. You go from one question to the next and answer them as well as possible. As you answer each question, you may feel more or less confident about whether you answered a question correctly. Now, before submitting your final answers you have two options: Revise some of your answers and select a different answer or stick with your first intuition and keep your first answers. What would you do?

It turns out that people tend to stick with their first answers – a phenomenon that is called the first instinct fallacy (1). Now, given that this is labelled a fallacy already tells you what the better choice would have been: Revising your first answers! The reasons for why we tend to stick with our initial answers is that the feeling of regret we experience when changing from an initially correct to an incorrect answer is unbearable and we tend to remember these salient instances better than instances where we changed an answer to a correct one. The counterintuitive finding, however, is that revising a previous answer in an exam situation leads more often to a change from incorrect to correct than vice versa. Merry et al. (2) investigated this by checking a total of 157 multiple-choice exams in physiology and biology university courses for eraser marks and scratch-outs and coded the frequencies of ‘right to wrong’, ‘wrong to right’, and ‘wrong to wrong’ changes. They also asked students and teachers whether they think changing initial answers helps or hurts overall test performance. So, what did they find: First, they revealed that while more students than teachers said that changing answers generally helps to increase performance, more teachers than students claimed that changing one’s initial answer is more likely to hurt performance. Second, looking at the actual response changes, students were more likely to change their answers from ‘wrong to right’ than to ‘right to wrong’ or ‘wrong to wrong’.

Couchman et al. (3) went one step further and examined boundary conditions for when changing first answers in multiple-choice exams is particularly beneficial, i.e., leading to improved performance. As mentioned above, students’ confidence in the correctness of their answers will fluctuate from one question to the next. After answering a question, you can probably indicate quite well whether you knew or guessed an answer. Couchman et al. showed that this is indeed the case and using this immediate judgment to decide whether to revise an answer or not led to increased test performance – because students were more likely to change answers they were unsure about (guessed) and a change led to selecting the correct answer instead. Importantly, this was only found when students used their immediate judgment of confidence to make this decision. Delayed confidence judgments after the exam were less effective to assess confidence – students at this point had a less reliable memory about whether they guessed or knew specific answers.

What are the practical takeaways for students sitting multiple-choice exams? After answering each multiple-choice question, ask yourself whether you knew the answer or whether you guessed the answer. If you think that you guessed the answer and hence are less confident in your answer, highlight or tag that question to go back to it later. Before submitting your answers, go back to all tagged questions and revise them. For those answers, a change is more likely to result in a correct answer than in an incorrect answer.

References

(1) Kruger, J., Wirtz, D., & Miller, D. T. (2005). Counterfactual thinking and the first instinct fallacy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(5), 725.

(2) Merry, J. W., Elenchin, M. K., & Surma, R. N. (2021). Should students change their answers on multiple choice questions?. Advances in Physiology Education, 45(1), 182-190.

(3) Couchman, J. J., Miller, N. E., Zmuda, S. J., Feather, K., & Schwartzmeyer, T. (2016). The instinct fallacy: The metacognition of answering and revising during college exams. Metacognition and Learning, 11(2), 171-185.