Science Tip: Cancelling Away Carelessness

Quoting a colleague of mine, “careless” means you could “care less”. Children are often not aware of the heavy cost of carelessness.

Each careless MCQ mistake in a Maths or Science exam costs 2% of the total score. That’s huge. A couple of such mistakes could make the difference between Band 1 and Band 2.

The good news is that it’s not that hard to mitigate. Just taking the 2 seconds to cancel away non-answers, we can easily cancel away the bulk of careless mistakes.

Consider the example below:

Applying the strategy, it would look like this:

True or False?

The most common careless mistakes fall into this category. The question requires a student to identify which statements are false, and he or she identifies those which are true. In the above example, many students would choose answer 1.

We can easily overcome this mistake by underlining and putting a “✓” over words like “true” and “correct”; and putting a “X” over words like “untrue”, “incorrect”, “false” and “not true”. In the above example, this serves as a reminder that we are looking for statements with “X” next to them.

Cancelling Non-answers

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous creation, Detective Sherlock Holmes, said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

This simple strategy does four things:

1. Increases your chances

When you encounter a question that you have difficulty with, eliminating non-answers narrows down the possible answers. For each non-answer that you are able to eliminate, it increases your chances of guessing the right answer by a whopping 25%.

2. Saves mental energy

I’m not an expert but I believe that most people can only process one thing at a time.

Students who don’t apply the strategy have to hold the information of which of the statements are true or false in their short-term memory, take note of what the question is requiring of them, and then parse that temporarily stored information into each of the multiple choices to see which one fits. Conversely, with the strategy, all they have to is to look for letters with an “X” next to them – one process.

3. Makes checking easier

As the process has already been marked down on the question, there is no need to redo the question, which is what most students do when they check. In fact, because the process is so rigorous and involved, the final answer is almost always confirmed. Time is better spent on questions that the student is unsure about.

4. Saves time

In the example, simply by knowing that leaves help plants to respire, we can eliminate any of the choices that have “A” in them. In this case, it leaves only one probable answer. I have found that in most cases for questions with the structure above, just 2 statements are enough to eliminate 50% of the choices.

However, I still advise students to read through all the statements, even if they have arrived at the correct answer, just to make sure they did not miss anything. Which brings us to the next point.

Best Answer

Many questions in MCQ require the student to identify the best answer. There may be more than one probable answer, but one of them is more accurate than the other.

For example:

Many students would answer 2, seeing that there is no food in the jar, and not even read the other two options. However, the flies would more likely die from a lack of oxygen than food after one day. Hence, answer 4 would be more accurate.

Again, eliminating the non-answers, 1 and 3, would leave just two probable answers for the student to consider, and would increase their chances of arriving at the correct one.

If your child is prone to carelessness, pick one completed exam paper and total the number of marks that were lost to carelessness. Then teach him or her this strategy and discover the huge difference this simple strategy can make.

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