Strategies for Difficult Multiple Choice Questions

Once you’ve mastered your material, and learned the specific strategies for approaching multiple choice exams, you’ve got one area left to master: the questions themselves.

Multiple Choice Question Structure

Multiple choice tests have their own fancy jargon.

The question itself is called the stem. The various options available to choose from are sometimes called foils (but "options" tends to be easier for our purposes). The correct foil can be called the key, and all the incorrect ones are sometimes called distractors.

Finally, the whole package of stem and foils together is called an item.

For example:

Multiple choice tests can be:

a) Easier than essay-type exams because they often emphasize general information
b) Harder than essay-type exams because the time pressures are greater
c) Easier or harder depending on the student and test developer
d) All of the above

The Process of Elimination for Multiple Choice Questions

The standard mindset for any kind of testing is to come up with the right answer. Right? Well, that’s certainly a valid approach. After all, if you come up with all the right answers, then you’ll get a perfect score. What could be easier?

Welcome to reality. In the real world, people don’t know all the right answers. You may not even know most of the right answers. However, we do know that in multiple choice questions, the answer is there somewhere. You just have to find it.

Finding the right answer can be like trying to remember something that’s on the tip of your tongue. The more you think about it the more elusive it can be. Sometimes, to remember things, you need to come at them…well, sort of sideways.

The equivalent process to this for multiple choice questions is called Process of Elimination, or POE. Using POE is simple. Instead of trying to find the right answer, simply try to find and eliminate the wrong ones. What’s left must be correct.

Remember: Multiple choice questions are about eliminating wrong answers, not necessarily finding right ones.

Here are a few techniques that help you with process of elimination:

1. Treat Every Option as a True / False

Another way to look at multiple choice exams is a series of True/False statements arranged in groups. If T/F questions are your style, you might find it beneficial to approach an exam in this way.

To do this, read the stem, and the first option as a single statement. For example:

Multiple choice tests can be:

a) Easier than essay-type exams because they often emphasize general information
b) Harder than essay-type exams because the time pressures are greater
c) Easier or harder depending on the student and test developer
d) All of the above

To tackle this question using the T/F technique, take the stem and first response together: “Multiple choice tests can be…Easier that essay-type exams because they often emphasize general information.”

Is this True or False? It's True. Put a big letter “T” beside option (a), and proceed on to (b). Do the same.

In this case, the answers are all true, so the correct response is (d).

2. Deal With Negatives

There’s nothing less worse than not answering a question incorrectly.

Does that make sense to you? At first glance, this sentence is basically gibberish. But it does have a meaning. On a multiple choice test you may have to decipher statements like the one above just to understand the question before you even start trying to find the correct response. Single, double, even triple negatives are often used to complicate the meaning of a multiple choice question. And misreading just one negative means the whole meaning of the statement is reversed!

The key to negatives is to rewrite the question. Let’s look at the above phrase again, and identify negatives, and word combinations that can be reduced: There’s nothing less worse than not answering a question incorrectly.

Let’s start with less worse. What does less worse mean? If something is less worse, it must mean “better”. So less worse=better

What about “not” and the prefix “in”. The great thing about multiple negatives is that they cancel each other out. We can get rid of one negative from a sentence as long as we get rid of another one to keep the balance. As long as we do this in pairs, the meaning of the sentence stays the same. So, stroke out “not” and “in”. What does our sentence say now?

There’s nothing better than answering a question correctly.

Simple, and easy to understand!

3. Cover the Answers

This is an easy, but often overlooked strategy. Simply cover all the answers, leaving just the multiple choice question exposed. This allows you to focus, and it gives you the option of trying to guess the answer first. This method can be quite effective.