Ever wondered what goes behind making a GAMSAT MCQ? It's a game between the examiner and the student. One wrong move and the test-maker checkmates you before you can blink. So how do you read your examiner's moves? Read on to find out…

Let's first see how it all started. During a convention of the American Psychological Association, a bunch of educational experts, led by Harvard Professor Benjamin S. Bloom decided to list the various "cognitive domains." To a layman (and that includes you and me) it denotes the various levels of understanding a student has gained. An extensive research of 8 years followed, and "Bloom's Taxonomy" saw the light of day. It has been effectively applied to show how MCQs can test:

* Knowledge (terms, theories, facts)
* Comprehension (interpret and summarise)
* Application (applying rules to a new situation)



So how is Mr. Bloom's theory useful to you? Well, knowing exactly what GAMSAT MCQs are designed to test can give you clues on ways to tackle them. GAMSAT frames MCQs to test reasoning skills rather than mere ‘knowledge chunks.' GAMSAT MCQs rarely seek to know the How… Where…What…of things. You learnt all about gravity in class, yet seeing an apple fall to the ground never made you wonder until you heard of a guy called Newton. Application involves both knowledge and understanding of basic concepts. If you don't know and understand the concept of gravity, you will not be able to apply it in a new situation, for instance, calculating someone's weight on another planet. GAMSAT MCQs test application, and by default also knowledge and understanding of core concepts.

Now, let us see what an MCQ looks like:



* A good stem usually phrases the question in a clear manner.
* The ‘correct answer' or key is surrounded by two or more wrong ones called distracters.
* Test makers like to strengthen easy distracters and make them more plausible.
* A good MCQ has more than one ‘near miss' answers or distracters. However, if an MCQ has been answered incorrectly by a majority of students who fared well in the other MCQs, the distracter may be faulty and has to be replaced.

GAMSAT test makers use various techniques to make the distracters more "plausible" and the bank of MCQs they prepare is always under a process of feedback and fine tuning. For instance, GRE examiners include 10 non-tested MCQs (which students are not marked upon) into the real test paper just to check out the loopholes: Do a majority of students find it easy to answer? Is a particular distracter an easy give away? Is a particular distracter too convoluted? So the next time, you find yourself at loggerheads with a particular MCQ during a test…move on to the next one. Chances are it is a dummy MCQ.

Hope you are a little more enlightened on MCQs…and the next time you sit down with a bunch of GAMSAT sample test papers, the MCQs won't seem so alien after all!

References:

http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/trns/mcqs/index.html

http://focalworks.in/resources/white_papers/creating_assessments/2-4.html