By Jessica Anderson & Adina Glickman

By now, you have probably had at least one midterm experience while at Stanford. If not, you have managed to escape the beast.

Often exams will include what some like to call “Multiple Choice Questions” or what I refer to as, Neo’s curse. When presented with an open ended question, you rely on what you know to fill in the blanks. But when someone offers you a red pill and a blue pill, the presence of an additional option can alter everything you thought you knew. All of a sudden you are second guessing everything, including whether or not you are caught up in some alternate reality. So what do you do to select an answer…and actually pick the right one?

Multiple choice questions

• Spend LOTS of time understanding the question. Really digging into the problem will yield amazing insight into how to solve it. Expert problem solvers spend 90% of their time looking at the question.
• If it’s a complex question, break it down and make sure you understand each piece of it.
• Diagram the question.

Multiple choice answers

Rather than drowning in a sea of seemingly random words, be systematic and go through EACH answer choice and determine whether it makes sense. If anything in the answer is false, then the entire choice is false.

If the question is looking for a true statement, that choice won’t be in the running. For example:

Q: What is the best day to eat out at a restaurant?

A) Sleepday
Ask yourself: is this for real? Sleepday is not even a real day of the week, so no matter what the question, this will be a “False” answer.

B) Tuesday and Sleepday
Ask yourself: is all of this statement true? Well sure, the sun is round, but the moon is not flat. So this answer is a “False” answer.

C) Not Sunday, since all the food is almost a week old
Ask yourself, is this true?

D) Tuesday, when food deliveries are made

E) Friday, when it’s the busiest and the wait staff is most attentive

I know the task of making a selection can be overwhelming, but it is better to make a selection than to leave the question unanswered. By making a choice, you have already increased the likelihood of marking the correct answer. Think about it this way, if Neo hadn’t chosen either pill, we might all be trapped inside the matrix.

P.S. If the test was in your Psych course, the right answer would be E, but if it was in an Epidemiology class, it would be D.