This reminds me of a class I had as an undergraduate. To avoid taking another class with a lab, I took Ethnobotany to finish out my general science requirements. The tests were multiple choice with conjunctive answers. For example:
The parts of a flower include:
a) Petal
b) Seed
c) Stamen
d) Sepal
To which the correct answer is a, c, and d. It was computer scored such that the only correct answer was to bubble a, c, and d: bubbling a and c got you no points, nor did bubbling a, b, c, and d, for example.
Given this test format, I put the Conjunctive Fallacy to work for me. When I came across a question where I had no idea if one of the options was part of the answer, I never included it since including it would have made the resulting answer less likely to be true than the answer would have been by leaving it off. The result: I got several questions right that I would have otherwise missed.
When I came across a question where I had no idea if one of the options was part of the answer, I never included it since including it would have made the resulting answer less likely to be true than the answer would have been by leaving it off.
That does not make sense. If the option you had no idea about were indeed part of the answer, then leaving it out would cause your answer to be incorrect. The choice is between answer like “a and b and c and d” or “a and b and c and not d”. The Conjunction Fallacy would involve comparing these to the answer “a and b and c”, which, while more likely than the previous choices because it dominates them, is not an admissible answer to the test as you described it.
What may have made this strategy beneficial, is that if you are more likely to recognize options that actually apply to the question, since you had been studying the subject matter, so options that you had no idea about were likely unrelated to the question.
This reminds me of a class I had as an undergraduate. To avoid taking another class with a lab, I took Ethnobotany to finish out my general science requirements. The tests were multiple choice with conjunctive answers. For example:
To which the correct answer is a, c, and d. It was computer scored such that the only correct answer was to bubble a, c, and d: bubbling a and c got you no points, nor did bubbling a, b, c, and d, for example.
Given this test format, I put the Conjunctive Fallacy to work for me. When I came across a question where I had no idea if one of the options was part of the answer, I never included it since including it would have made the resulting answer less likely to be true than the answer would have been by leaving it off. The result: I got several questions right that I would have otherwise missed.
That does not make sense. If the option you had no idea about were indeed part of the answer, then leaving it out would cause your answer to be incorrect. The choice is between answer like “a and b and c and d” or “a and b and c and not d”. The Conjunction Fallacy would involve comparing these to the answer “a and b and c”, which, while more likely than the previous choices because it dominates them, is not an admissible answer to the test as you described it.
What may have made this strategy beneficial, is that if you are more likely to recognize options that actually apply to the question, since you had been studying the subject matter, so options that you had no idea about were likely unrelated to the question.