Multiple Choice Questioning for UK Students

I live and work in the UK, and so naturally a lot of my students end up being in the UK school system. This presents a few distinct challenges when it comes to helping them prepare for American standardised tests like the SAT and ACT.

There are some topics covered on these exams that are either not taught in UK schools, or perhaps taught a bit earlier to American students.

There is often a substantial gap between the style of questioning on these exams, and the kinds of questions UK students are used to. 

And then there is the difference which is perhaps the most glaring, the element of the exam with which most UK students will have little to no practical experience: multiple choice questions with a single correct answer.

It is totally understandable that students who have spend 10+ years in schooling receiving partial credit on their math exams for showing their reasoning may find it unsettling to deal with questions where the scoring is binary: correct or incorrect. These same students, who are used to being evaluated in English topics primarily through the use of essays, may balk at the idea of multiple choice reading analysis questions. They may struggle with the concept that there can be single, objectively right answers to questions like “what is the function of this portion of the text?”.

And so this multiple-choice format tends to necessitate, or at least reward, adaptation. On math questions it is still a good idea to write out our work, in order to simplify the task, avoid mistakes, and have something to go back through in case we find ourselves in a dead end. But why not leverage the multiple choice structure to our advantage? If we find we have difficulty making progress on a particular math question, we can look to the answers for additional information. What do they tell us about the problem? After all, one of them must be correct. As a very simple example, if we are presented with four answers options which are X,Y coordinate pairs, and our answers are: 

A. (2,3)  B. (2,5)  C. (4,3)  D. (4,5)

then a pattern in the answers emerges. Our X coordinate will be either 2 or 4, and our Y-coordinate will be either 3 or 5. That’s useful information. That aint half bad considering I haven’t told you the problem yet, or even come up with a problem yet.

When it comes to multiple choice questions on the English side of the exams, UK students often have a difficult time with the perceived subjectivity of the questions and answers. We might encounter the outrage of a student defending the answer they’ve selected: “My answer is way better than that one. It’s a subjective judgement and I think mine is right!” When I encounter this attitude I have a question that I really, really love to ask:

“When you buy someone a gift, do you get them something you like? Or something they like?”

I love to ask this question because of the quiet moment we get immediately afterwards, where the student gets to ponder things like “what on earth is he talking about?” and “how much are my parents paying this guy?”. They will very often ask to hear the question again and I will repeat “When you buy someone a gift, do you get them something you like or something they like?” And they will look back at me and say “something they like” and I will nod my head wisely in agreement.

Then I’ll ask how this relates to the our exam preparation. Well, each question can be thought of as offering up to the writers of this exam a gift. Our answer is the gift we offer to them, and we would really love it to be the one they were hoping for when they wrote those questions. And this means that when it isn’t the answer they intended, it is our job not to defend and justify our response, but to take the approach of “Oh, they didn’t like this answer, why not? What might they point to that I could have noticed that would indicate it was incorrect? They preferred this other answer over here. What do they like so much about that one? What could I have noticed about that one that I might have recognised as being so appealing to these test writers?”

Making the transition from searching for the answers we think are correct to searching for the answers the test writers intended is a subtle but powerful shift which de-personalises the problem solving process and keeps us focused on the real goal we are pursuing, which is to maximise our scores by getting as many questions right as possible within the allotted time, NOT to be right according to our own judgment and principles.