A better way to fill in those missing bubbles in the standardized test

I guess it’s all too late now, but it just came to me how they could’ve fixed the problem of the blank answers in multiple-choice tests.

This recent post by Palko reminded me of our earlier discussion of why a penalty for getting the wrong answer on a test (the SAT, which is used in college admissions and which is used in the famous 8 schools example) is not a “penalty for guessing.”

The backstory is that the SAT used to have 4 options for each question, and you’d get 1 point for a correct answer, -1/4 point for a wrong answer, and 0 points if you left that question blank. It seems that the -1/4 bit was freaking people out–it was wrongly perceived as a penalty for guessing and perhaps correctly perceived as adding confusion for test-takers–so they changed the system so that you get 0 points for a wrong answer, same as if you left it blank.

As Palko pointed out back when this came up a decade ago, the SAT is a timed test, and, under this new system, students who are running out of time without having read all the questions are put in the awkward position of needing to stop right before time runs out so as to fill in bubbles randomly.

It just struck me that this problem could be fixed using a simple solution: If you want to give 0 points for a wrong answer, then just give +1/4 for each question that is left blank. This way the student doesn’t need to fill in any bubbles randomly; the scoring mechanism essentially does that automatically, just replacing the random score by its expected value.

As I said, I guess it’s all too late now because I can’t imagine they’d change the system again. Too bad.