Students' Guessing Strategies: Do They Work?

Abstract

The effectiveness of the most popular guessing strategies was investigated. The selection of the least-used letter choice, the random selection of a choice, and the selection of choice “c” were identified by 120 psychology students as the most frequently used forms of guessing. Those strategies and the strategy of selecting the longest answer were applied to the test files of six introductory psychology texts. The strategies did not produce higher-than-chance scores for any of the test files and in several instances yielded lower-than-chance results. The implications for test-taking strategies and test construction were discussed.