The idea of doing significantly worse than chance by guessing on the test sounds absurd, but I recall that when I was on Chemistry Team in high school, many of the teams we competed against managed it, with teams of four getting average scores of below 20% on four-option multiple choice tests.
If the students were really guessing at random, they ought to expect to do better, but answering questions to the best of their limited knowledge may cause them to do significantly worse than chance if the questions are designed to trip up people with common misunderstandings or gaps in their knowledge of the subject.
In that case, if a team knows it’s that bad it should guess without looking at the answers (and if that doesn’t work, try to generate pseudorandom numbers somehow). If the goal is to learn what you know about chemistry, you can make a note of what you think the correct answer is to the side and then still guess randomly. So the problem here is poor calibration, I guess.
That would have improved their performance, but I think if they had been clever enough to think of that sort of strategy, they probably wouldn’t have needed it.
The idea of doing significantly worse than chance by guessing on the test sounds absurd, but I recall that when I was on Chemistry Team in high school, many of the teams we competed against managed it, with teams of four getting average scores of below 20% on four-option multiple choice tests.
If the students were really guessing at random, they ought to expect to do better, but answering questions to the best of their limited knowledge may cause them to do significantly worse than chance if the questions are designed to trip up people with common misunderstandings or gaps in their knowledge of the subject.
In that case, if a team knows it’s that bad it should guess without looking at the answers (and if that doesn’t work, try to generate pseudorandom numbers somehow). If the goal is to learn what you know about chemistry, you can make a note of what you think the correct answer is to the side and then still guess randomly. So the problem here is poor calibration, I guess.
That would have improved their performance, but I think if they had been clever enough to think of that sort of strategy, they probably wouldn’t have needed it.