New Research by Turner College Economist Examines Test-Taking Strategies and Outcomes in Business Education

In their new study on test-wiseness strategies in business and economic education, Turner College economist Frank Mixon and his co-author Steven Caudill of Florida Atlantic University point out that the use of large lecture halls in business and economic education often dictates the use of multiple-choice exams to measure student learning.  Their study, which appears in the latest issue of Stats, asserts that student performance on these types of exams can be viewed as the result of the process of elimination of incorrect answers rather than the selection of the correct answer.  More specifically, how students respond on a multiple-choice test can be broken down into the fractions of exam questions where no wrong answers can be eliminated (i.e., random guessing), one wrong answer can be eliminated, two wrong answers can be eliminated, and, eventually, all wrong answers can be eliminated.  The data for the study come from student performance on a final exam in a principles of microeconomics course.  These consist of 94 exam grades over each of 100 questions.  The final exam consisted of multiple-choice questions, with four answer choices offered for each question.  The empirical model is a mixture of binomials in which the probability of a correct choice depends on the number of incorrect choices eliminated.  Thus, for each of the 100 questions on the exam, students can eliminate zero, one, two, or three incorrect answers.  Eliminating zero incorrect answers is considered random guessing and eliminating three incorrect questions results in a correct response.  Between these two extremes is what Mixon and Caudill refer to as “informed guessing,” where one or two incorrect answers have been eliminated.  The results indicate that the responses to about 26 percent of the questions on the exam can be characterized as random guessing.  Additionally, about 12 percent of the questions were answered with one incorrect choice eliminated, while about 61 percent of the questions were answered as if two incorrect choices had been eliminated.  Finally, none of the questions on the exam was completed after eliminating all of the incorrect choices.  Stats is an international, peer-reviewed journal on statistical science.  The journal focuses on methodological and theoretical papers in statistics, probability, stochastic processes and innovative applications of statistics in all scientific disciplines including biological and biomedical sciences, medicine, business, economics and social sciences, physics, data science and engineering.