First of all, you’re not alone. One of the great injustices of our modern education system is that many people are being left behind by objective testing because they aren’t taught how to master the test format. Students are offered all kinds of support for the tools of essay-style response tests – skills like  spelling and grammar – but we don’t learn the skills for multiple choice test-taking.

The fact is, multiple choice questions and tests can be incredibly challenging.  Here are just a few reasons why multiple choice tests may be giving you grief:

• Overconfidence – you think multiple choice tests are easy, so you study less.
• Trickery – your professor thinks that multiple choice tests are easy, so they create tricky, confusing questions.
• Time Pressures – multiple choice tests are often intentionally lengthened.  We’ve all felt this one.
• Broader range – the questions are short and fast, so a LOT of ground can be covered in one exam.
• Specific data – Since the answers are right there on the page (yup, it’s true), specifics like dates, names and places become fair game.
• Can’t bluff – No BS on these suckers.  No part marks.  No bonuses for writing an eloquent sentence to disguise the fact that you have absolutely no idea what the answer is.
• Difficult for teacher to write – That’s right.  Creating a good multiple choice test is a skill.  And not all teachers and professors have it.
• Content is shuffled – many multiple choice tests have no structure whatsoever.  You could be answering a physics question and a history question back to back.  That’s hard on the noggin.

What to do about it

The solution is to fill the gap that the education system isn’t. To get the marks you deserve on multiple choice tests, you need to master the MCQ test format. You need to learn test taking skills that are specific to multiple choice exams – not generic ones for “all” tests. My recommendation, and granted it’s a biased one, is that you use Mastering Multiple Choice. You can read the testimonials if you like, or the FAQ’s, or you can just order it. But it will help. Guaranteed.

If there’s one complaint I hear more often than any other from students about their multiple choice exams, it’s that they can’t seem to finish them on time.  And it’s a reasonable complaint. Nothing’s more frustrating than leaving pages of unfilled bubbles – particularly on exams that don’t penalize for guessing.

Not finishing on time is not fundamentally a time-management problem. Yes, you need to keep an eye on the clock, but no, you don’t need to allocate a specific amount of time for each answer. Those approaches don’t work on multiple choice questions because they don’t take into account how much harder (and therefore more time consuming) some questions are.

Finishing every multiple choice test on time is a test-taking skill, not a time management one. To finish on time, every time, you need to use the cycle method of writing your exam. Take multiple passes through the exam, and don’t waste much time on questions that you can’t answer in short order.

In addition to a host of other benefits, the cycle or multi-pass technique does wonders for time management.  It allows you to be constantly aware of how much you have to do in the time remaining. When you work through multiple choice exam from start to finish, in order, you have no idea how much time you’re going to need to get through the rest of the exam – just because you’re on question 50 out of 100 at the midpoint, doesn’t mean the next 50 questions are going to take the same amount of time. When you use multiple passes, you have a much better grasp of how much time you need to finish, Stick to it and you’ll finish on time, every time.