Video Transcript General Test Taking Strategies: Foundational Principles for All Students Hi, I’m Don Roebuck and I direct Student Academic Support Services on the Health Sciences Campus at VCU. Today we are going to be talking about test taking strategies in two different sessions. In the first session we are going to talk about the generic kinds of considerations for test taking. Managing the exam, we are going to look at the different question types and also look at a couple of special situations. On your screen, you will also notice a section for undergraduate students and also another section for medical and professional school students. In those sessions I will be talking about test wiseness clues and last resort strategies as they apply to the different programs. I want to begin by talking about strategies for managing the exam. First of all, some pre-test consideration strategies for proceeding and being active vs. passive. Pre test considerations I often ask students when I am working with them to think about their pre-test behavior. Sometimes I’ll ask them what are they doing the particularly the last 10 or 15 minutes. If I am a fly on the wall watching you what’s your behavior, what are you doing? Frequently students tell me that they are sitting there going through their notes, going through their last minute cram. I tend to caution folks about that. Think about this, what are you looking at? You are usually looking at material that you don’t know or material that you are uncomfortable with. And I think for people who have test anxiety that can be particularly dangerous. We tend to be focused on what we don’t know rather than what we do know. And so when you go into the test, begin the test, you have a negative dialogue so I suggest 10-15 minutes before the test you just knock off studying and relax. The other behavior that I observe is that people sit in the classroom and they are popping questions at each other. Again, I think that is particularly dangerous because someone is going to ask you something that you didn’t think was important or you are going to hear an answer that is different from your perspective and if that happens up goes your anxiety and you carry that anxiety into the test and you are not going to be as focused as you need to be to begin. Let me also mention something very quickly; always anticipate the first page to give you some difficulty. Most people don’t relax until they get into the second or third page of their test. So anticipate that first page to give you a little stress. But I would suggest that if you are used to sitting in the classroom just before the test popping questions at each other that you stay out of the room and just stay away from folks that are doing that. I think for most people that can be very distracting and dangerous. Think about what you do when the instructor hands you the test. There are students who tend to be skimming through the test looking at it before they begin. In my judgement, I think that is dangerous. Again, particularly for people who have test anxiety, what they tend to be looking for unconsciously in most instances are questions that they don’t know. And all they focus on “I don’t know this, I don’t know that”. And again, I think that sets them up so I suggest that you not skim through the test. I would suggest that if you need to know how long it is if you look at the back page to know how long it is if you do it very very quickly you may get a sense of the kind of questions that are there. Some people, for example, prefer to start with the short answer questions. Some people prefer to begin the test at the end and work forward – that’s also fine. At least if you work forward, you know how many questions there are. If you start at the beginning and work toward the end, you’ve forgotten how long the test is. You’re constantly going back and checking it out. Strategy for proceeding. Oh, let me back up a little bit and talk about beginning the test. I often suggest that you take a minute before you even begin the test and go to the back – it’s usually blank – and do a brain dump. And students often ask me, “What’s a brain dump?” I suggest you take about a minute and dump things out that you may be a little uncomfortable with. It could be lists, it could be formulas, it could be figures. Just take about a minute and dump it out. It tends to relax you. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that material is going to be on the test, but if it is and you’re in the middle of the test and you may have forgotten something, you can go back and it might trigger something. It’s not cheating, because it’s coming from here at the point of the test. I would also suggest that if you tend to wind down and get tired during a test, you might want to pop a piece of candy in your pocket or having something like that during the test and give you a little more energy if that’s permitted in the classroom. All the other standard pre-test considerations are common sense. Make sure you have a pen, make sure you have pencil and paper and you’re prepared so that doesn’t become a point of anxiety. Strategy for proceeding. I tell students there are three kinds of questions on every test: those you know cold, those you need to think about, and those you don’t know where the heck they came from. My bias is that you want to go through the test three times. And often students will look at me and say, “How do you do that? We don’t have the time to do that.” What I suggest, in the first pass through the test, you do those that you know cold first. Those you need to think about tend to be those that you can eliminate a couple of the answers. You begin to vacillate on two or three answers. Typically, if you can’t answer that question in 30 seconds, I would suggest you code it, circle it, circle the number, move on. If you come to a question you absolutely don’t know, and you recognize it as such, I’m not sure I would spend much time reading it, thinking about it. I would merely check it and continue to move on. When I get to the end of the test, after the first pass through, I’ve done all the ones that I know, and I’ve coded the other two types, I would suggest you put down your pencil, close your eyes, relax for about thirty seconds, and then come back and start working through those you need to think about, get those out of the way, and then come back and hit those two or three that you really don’t know. My rationale is, if you run out of time on the test, you get credit for what you know because you did those first. Those you need to think about, typically what happens, those are the questions we know, but we begin to vacillate a little bit and up goes our anxiety. Once your anxiety goes up, you tend to carry that anxiety and stress into subsequent questions. When you go back later and you look at those, you end up missing them not because you didn’t know them, but because you were frustrated or you were concerned about previous questions. So it allows you to manage that anxiety a little better. Those that you absolutely don’t know, and there are always going to be two or three on every test, anticipate them. If you anticipate two or three on the test, when you run into them, they’re not going to blow you out of the water. The attitude you take towards those is, “If I get them right, it’s a gift.” And it’ll take some of the stress away. And we’ll talk about guessing or some last resort strategy for those two or three. Activity versus passivity. And I think this is a very important concept in test taking. The notion is that you want to be in the driver’s seat. If you attack the test, if you are aggressive, if you are assertive, if your locus of control emerges, you tend to be in control over this, it’s not controlling me, I’m going to perform better. And so what I suggest is that this, the pen, be as active as possible when you are taking the test. And I’m going to slip down now and talk about question types and talk about activity versus passivity as I begin to talk about strategies that go with question types. First question we’re going to talk about is the Type A or One Best Answer question. One best answer questions: in terms of being active, and if you don’t do this, then I suggest that you just try to make this an unconscious behavior because it tends to help you focus. As you read questions – it’s a pencil-paper type test – as you read questions, just unconsciously highlight questions as you read. It tends to help you get focused, and it tends to help you avoid misinterpreting the question. So in this case we have the release of carbon dioxide from the blood in the pulmonary capillaries as retarded by. Usually in every question, there is a phrase around which every question is built and if you can isolate that, you can tend to avoid misinterpreting the question and get to the intent quickly as I’ve said. The other notion in terms of being active is to keep all your work out here [Don boxes the letters to the answer choices in one long box]. If you know an answer is false, you want to be this active [Don crosses out the letters of three choices]. And incidentally, I’m not sure of the answer to this question, so if I’m selecting an incorrect answer, don’t worry about it. I’m using this as an example. But if you know an answer is incorrect, you want to do this. I would suggest you avoid doing this kind of thing [Don crosses out an entire choice, not just the letter]. It tends to eat up time. Some people like to do an F out here or a T or so on. Again, I think it eats up too much time. If at that point you’ve been able to eliminate a couple of answers, and you start to vacillate and you’re not real sure, you want to be sensitive to your first impression. If you had a first impression, put a mark next to it, and if at that point you still can’t make the decision, I suggest you circle the question and continue moving. When you come back on your second pass through the test, if you still can’t decide between B or D, you’ll want to go with your first impressions. The first impression usually tends to be a better bet. Often I remind students particularly in the health sciences when they are dealing with a lot of information and a lot of volume that they have to go through, usually what happens in these situations, when you’re vacillating between a couple of answers, frequently the subconscious takes over and gives them a little kick or a little impression, and I encourage students to trust their kicks, trust their impressions. I am often asked about changing answers. In fact, I had an opportunity to do a lot of test analysis with students and one of the things we’ve looked for are the numbers of questions that they tend to go back and change their answer on. I would have to say that a high percentage of time, more students change answers from right to wrong and end up hurting themselves. I would suggest that if you know that’s a behavior that gets you into trouble, that you try to check that behavior. Because if you think about it, what happens is we’ll go back and change the answers on 8 questions, we go back and look at it, 5 of those you changed from right to wrong, and 3 we changed from wrong to right. Guess which ones we gravitate to. We focus on the three we changed, feel good about those, and ignore the five. So I would suggest that if you’re changing answers that you attempt not to do that. One best answer questions. On occasion, you will find words like “most.” I can almost guarantee you that when you find a most in the question, there are going to be a couple of answers that tend to be correct. Or “initial” or “first.” Those tend to be priority questions. I tell students that if you find more than one correct answer in your question, there are possibly a couple things going on. They want the first thing that’s occurring, the initial thing, for example. Or, if you find that four or five of them are correct, look for the answer that is the most universal. If I do this, it automatically includes the others. If this is occurring, the other processes, the other answers are occurring. So look for the wider, the broader answer in one best answer questions. I want to move on now and talk about one best answer negative questions. A negative question, and these are problematic for a lot of students, a negative question is a question in which you are going to have usually one of these words in the question itself: “no” or “not,” “never.” A very popular one of course is “except.” Sometimes you’ll find the phrase “all but one.” And occasionally you’ll find the words “all but” something. The problem with negative questions, and also in this case in this particular question we have the word “least.” Least would be another one. The problem with negative questions is that it forces us to think in the reverse. In life we don’t do that. I would often ask students if they got out of bed this morning that I am not not going to school today and that’s the way these particular questions are worded. We have to think in reverse and that can be tricky. There are a couple of strategies to use on a negative question, and I’m going to focus on one here and we’ll talk about some others when we get to the next question on test wiseness clues. From my perspective, what you want to do with a negative question is to just automatically eliminate the negative word. What you do then is take a negative question and you make it positive. In this case, on the negative question, you are always looking for the false answer or another consideration is the odd answer. We’ll talk about that later. If I rid myself of the negative word, the question now reads “A human infant who was separated from his mother in a secure environment for a prolonged period is likely to show” rather than “is least likely to show.” So if I’m thinking about this positively, I’m going to recognize that there are going to be, in this case, four true answers, one false answer. So if you think about this with me, if you take a baby away from its mother in a secure environment for a prolonged period of time and put it in a threatening environment, is that baby likely to show apathy and withdrawal? You bet. Compulsive interest in food? Maybe not. Don’t be afraid of the maybes. In every question, a good multiple choice question will usually have two answers that cause you to pause and think about them. So don’t be afraid of the maybes. There’s yes, no, maybe. That’s your answer as you go down through the answers. Will that baby show an inability to give or receive affection? You bet. Will that baby have retardation of skeletal growth? Huh. Not sure. Will that baby have speech difficulties? Most likely. So here are my two distracters. I’ll help you out a little bit. The theory they are testing here is failure to thrive. And in fact studies show that those babies do not grow well. So this is my odd answer [Don circles B] or my false answer. So with a negative question, rid yourself of the negative answer, and true and false and pick the false answer. You will be safer. Let’s move on and talk about the Type K multiple true and false. Some people call these the multiple multiple false. Most students don’t care for these. I’ve only found maybe 15, 16 folks in 25 years who really like to take Type K questions. If you are not familiar with it, I would suggest that you play with this a little bit before you take your next exam when the instructor uses the Type K question. It seems that science instructors and science core students like this kind of question. If you are not familiar with these, let me just take a minute to explain the question. You will have usually five options. There’s your question: “The molecular weight of a protein may be estimated by” and then you get four answers. If answers 1, 2, and 3 are correct, you would answer A. If only 1 and 3 are correct, you would answer B. If only 2 and 4 are correct, you would answer C. If only 4 is correct, you would answer D. If all are correct, you would answer E. I want to take a minute and talk about the strategy for this particular question, and I think this tends to take the sting out of it. What I have done here is taken the secondary options, where it says A, if only 1, 2, and 3 is correct. And I think it’s good to do this if you try to understand the question. A: 1, 2, and 3; B: 1 and 3; C: 2 and 4; D: 4; E: all. Those are my answer collections. These are my answer set: 1, 2, 3, and 4. This is a hypothetical question. The first thing you want to do on a Type K question is to look for an answer that is false, is your first strategy. Let’s assume now I look at answer 1 and I say, “Well, maybe.” I look at answer 2 and say, “Not sure, maybe.” I look at answer 3 and I say, “Ah. It is false.” The second thing then I am going to do if it is false is I’m going to eliminate. I’m going to eliminate any answer choice that has 3, which happen to be A, B, and E. Those are now out. I now know that my answer has to be C or D. The third thing I do is I ask myself, “What is the common answer in those that are left, C and D?” The common answer happens to be 4 here. I now know that 4 has to be true. I no longer worry about it. It may be that you are looking at 4 and pondering. You recognize that 3 as false, 4 has to be true. Which one of the answers am I going to contemplate, which one of the distracters? I am going to think about 2. 2 is going to determine whether I go with C or D. If I determine that 2 is false, then I’m going to stick with D. If I determine that it may be true, and I have a good strong hunch, I’m going to go with C. Let’s take another example. If you haven’t seen this before, it takes a couple of times to understand the procedure. Again, I really think it helps managing the question and it’s a little easier to do it this way than going down and trying to find one that’s true, and then matching it up. In this example, let’s assume that 1 is false. A brand new question here; 1 is false. Now, I’m going to eliminate. 1 is in A, 1 is in B, 1 is E, so I’m back to C and D. 4 has to be true, I’m going to contemplate 2. Another question, a brand new question here. Let’s assume I go down and I say, “1, maybe, 2, maybe, 3, maybe, ah, 4 is false.” What do I eliminate? C, 4, D has 4, E has 4. So C, D, and E are out, A and B remain. What’s common to A and B? You notice 1 and 3, 1 and 3. True, true. Which answer do I have to contemplate? I have to think about 2. What you will find in a generic Type K question is that answer 2 is the pivot answer usually about 75% of the time. Now, of course, there are always exceptions. You must take one more look at the exception. Brand new question here. Lets say I look at 1 and go “maybe.” I look at 2. 2 is false. What do I eliminate? I’m going to eliminate any answer with 2. A is out, C is out E is out. I’m left with B and D. Anything common? No. Are you dead in the water? No. You recognize that in this case all you need to know is one of them. If you know one of the three is true, you’ve got your answer. I come down and I contemplate and I go, “I know that 3 is true” then you have to go with B. If 3 is true, you end up with B. You also know that 4 now is false. If you’re not familiar with that strategy, I suggest you play with it, practice it a few times. It will help you immensely on the next test where you are taking type K questions. I will also say this - and I am going to come back to my original sheet for a type K question – this cannot be varied too much before they start giving away the answers. I would also suggest before you look at the answers, if they are using this style of a question, type K or a variation of a type K, look at what we call your secondary options, because I have literally seen exams and tests where you would have 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3 in each of them, sometimes 1, 2 or 3 of them and you’re looking at 4 and 5 out here in the explanations. So if you recognize 1 in all of them, then obviously it has to be true, and so on. So it’s always good to scan your secondary options before you do your question. Let’s look at a straight up matching question. Now I can’t tell you a lot about matching and the reason is that matching generally is pure recall. You don’t get into a whole lot of matching where you need to do some process thinking. Either you know it or you don’t. And as I said, I can’t tell you a lot. I would suggest that if you really don’t know an answer to a matching question you really don’t know, or some answers that you really don’t know. The best strategy in my opinion is to pick one answer and answer them all the same. I think statistically you are better off. Let’s assume in this case, I’ve got 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 and let’s say it goes to down to 29 and that gives me, I can’t count, gives you 10 questions. Let’s say of those 10, I knew 6 of them and there were 4 I had no idea. You are still better off taking a letter you haven’t used or one that you haven’t used very much and answering all 4 the same rather than random guessing. And that’s the straight up matching question. There’s another type of matching called type C and in this instance what they will do is give you 2 statements, and then a both and then a neither, and down here you would match it to the body of the question. In this case, you would answer A if only A is true relative to 31 here, or if only B is true, you would answer B and so on. What I remind students of is that you are dealing with A and B and sometimes it is easier to manage it this way. The best thing I can tell you, the only thing I can tell you about this type C matching is go with what you know. Don’t take chances. If you know that A is true, for example, and you’re not sure of B, you tend to be better off just sticking with A. If you’re not sure of either one of them, then you’d be better off sticking with neither. So the rule of thumb in this type of question is go with what you know and don’t take chances. There are a couple of special situations which I will mention very briefly. I call the first one “principle players.” Principle players questions are ones you look at and you go “Oh, my goodness, they’re talking about increase something, decrease something, increase, decrease, increase…” That can be very confusing. Many students get a little disheveled when they see that. What I tell folks to do is to look at what your principle players are, isolate them. In this case they are talking about – write it up here – MCD, RBC. Read your question. “When using an electronic cell counter, which of the following results would determine the presence of foliglutenin?” Make your decision. What happens to MCD, what happens to RBC? Then come down and pick it. Rather than read the question, then read all of these again and play tricks on your mind. Think about it, make your decision, find it. You’re safer. Occasionally, you will find that instructors will put in a third option that just does not make sense. And for those students for whom they believe that instructors try to trick them, this can be again a little disconcerting. I remind folks that it takes a lot of effort to make up a good test question. It is very difficult to write a good test question. And sometimes you will find that instructors will throw in an answer that just doesn’t make sense. It is totally absurd. Don’t let it throw you. Get rid of it, move on. In this case, the abdominal fluid is submitted from surgery, the physician wants to determine if the fluid is from urine, the technologist should smell the fluid, no. That’s a simplistic example, but it does happen occasionally, so be aware of that. And that concludes our first section on ways to manage the exam, looking at test question types and a couple of special situations.