Student answers to exam questions usually have two
possibilities: they are either right or wrong. Sometimes the question is worth
multiple points and it is possible to get “part marks” by getting some things
right and some things wrong. For the purposes of this post, I’ll ignore
situations where it is possible to get part marks. Let’s just assume questions
are the fill-in-the-blank or true-or-false type each worth 1 point.
What if school tests offered a third option?
You get 1 point for getting the answer right. You get no
points for leaving the answer blank. You lose 1 point for getting the answer
wrong.
This gives students a reason to “think before they speak” – to
distinguish between answers they’re more than 50% sure of and those that they’re
less than 50% sure of. Rather than taking a wild guess, students will learn the
skill of assessing the likelihood of their guesses being correct and holding
off if they aren’t certain enough. Each question is a reminder to think hard about whether they've really got the right answer. It's a call for self-skepticism.
I’m not sure whether this would have good consequences or
not. It could train people to be sheepish, risk-averse, and obedient. I’m also
not sure the 1-0-1 point system is optimal. Maybe it should be more like 2-0-1
so that guesses won’t be too harshly penalized. I think incorporating incorrect guesses into scoring systems could potentially have good effects on students.
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