A Good Wrong Answer

Every Wednesday night, I participate in a volunteer tutoring program in the UWS. This year, my student is preparing for the biology & math regents tests. Most of his homework consists of regents-like multiple choice questions. He has a tendency to read quickly and rush through them, which results in choosing "a good wrong answer." Multiple choice tests are not designed to be as easy as they look. A wild guess gives you a 25% chance of getting the answer, but the difficulty increases when more than one answer looks appealing. As we're going over the homework, I have my student read the entire question. Then he attempts to choose the right answer. Whether or not he chooses correctly, I make him explain why he picked it just to make sure it wasn't at random. Then I make him explain why the other 3 were wrong. Often enough, some of the wrong answers were good ones... ones designed to lure students in.

I remember math class from the 7th grade. It was the first class of the day and I had Mr. Hoch as my teacher. He was the person that introduced me to the idea of "a good wrong answer." When we went over examples in class, after arriving at the answer to a problem, he would often ask, "what's a good wrong answer?" I thought that was a genius way of preparing students for multiple choice tests and it also truly shows which students grasps the concepts. In math and in life, it's just as good to know what the answer is as why the wrong ones are logically wrong.