Take a This type of exam is really a challenge for students who are embarking on university studies. Not only do they have the pressure to succeed, but also they have the pressure to put high coefficients of certainty (from the teachers, and also sometimes from the parents).
Here, I will explain my technique to you (which has the merit of existing and working), I know a lot of people who work with this technique, and the results are good. I didn’t invent it, I was taught it by older students and, having tested it myself, I can attest to its effectiveness. However, if you have the desire and if you have a taste for risk, nothing prevents you from giving it a shot and testing new techniques! As I said above, my advice is not dogma and it’s up to you to experiment and find what works best for you – it’s the best thing you can do!
Which coefficients to choose – 1st pass
Personally, I start by answering the questions by throwing in a coefficient of certainty without thinking too much about it (or I put two when I hesitate).
-When I have no idea of the answer, I type at random and I put a coefficient 1 (I never put the 0 because I find it not very profitable personally
-When I have eliminated one or two proposals and I still hesitate between 2-3 different proposals, I put a coefficient of 2.
-Very (very!) rarely, when I came across it on a tip and would put my hand to the cut (this only happens to me every 100 or 200 questions!!), I put a coefficient of 5.
I strongly advise against answering with coefficients 5 before going to bac 2, it’s an unnecessary risk-taking (tell yourself that you need 3 good answers afterwards to catch up with the sauce if you screw up at 1 question!) – and know that I have already failed several exams because of a single coefficient 5 so we are not kidding with that (a 9.99/20, we do not always credit it, and it is really annoying to retake a course in second session for 0.01/20 points!).
Correct your coefficients – 2nd pass
After having done a good tour of the exam for the first time, I start to encode my answers and I generally answer everything (even when I have no idea of the right answer, I type in the pile and I put a coefficient 1). Once this encoding is done, I calculate my number of coefficients of each type (yes, I like to play with numbers – obviously I do this when I know I have time to answer open questions which are in addition to MCQ, if any!).
Personally, I force myself to often raise my coefficients (generally it is a question of transforming the coefficients 2 into coefficients 3 for the questions to which I am rather sure of myself) because I often tend to underestimate myself.
But it’s up to you to see according to your level of self-confidence and your estimate of your knowledge in the subject!
Small note: at the end, reread your coefficients 4 (and 5) one last time and weigh each word of each question because mistakes are easy in stress and often I find myself correcting my answer in the meantime because I read the question too quickly (or to reduce the coefficient because I took too much risk).
Take a negative-point exam
So, it should be known that the exams with negative points, as much as the certainty coefficients, appeal to the self-assessment capacity of the students. You have to know how to learn to admit when you don’t know the answer to the question. These exams were set up to eliminate students who did not have enough self-confidence or students who, precisely, tried too much at random; the goal being to avoid chance successes (although I don’t think that happens often!).
The most common “mistakes” among students regarding the strategy for negative points. -To answer too much: students who do not know and who are afraid of never having enough answers to succeed tend to risk answering a little “at random”, which means that even if technically they had more than half correct answers, they may miss by answering too many questions incorrectly.
-Not answering enough: it’s silly, but when you’re not sure enough of yourself, you can fail because you don’t dare to take the risk
What strategy to adopt?
It is therefore obvious that it is very important to know your strengths and weaknesses and to learn to measure your level of certainty when it comes to choosing whether or not to answer a question (depending on the question and of our knowledge – but also according to what we feel compared to the rest of the examination). This is the reason why I always recommend taking the exam (like the method for answering an MCQ) in two stages, once for certainties, then once to refine the copy that we will make.
What questions to answer – 1st pass
You must identify in this passage the easy questions (theory that you know inside out) but also the questions that you find too risky and that you will immediately put aside because you know that you risk screwing up at all the blows (we must have the wisdom to admit it, we are not all machines).
This is where you will actually do the work and where you need to focus to strategically count the number of questions you have already answered, and from there calculate the number of questions you will decide to answer! What I generally advise is to train enough to aim for between 60 and 75% good responses to training. Then, when you answer, you answer the percentage of answers to which you consider yourself to be close.(depending on the difficulty of the exam but also according to your knowledge of the course). For example, if you judge that you will have approximately 14/20, answer 70% of the questions knowing that all that you answer in addition is a risk to reduce your points already acquired, and then any question to which you will abstain may cause you to lose points as well. You still have to remember that for an exam with the weighting +1/0/-1, if you answer everything, and you have 75% of correct answers, you will only get the final mark of 10/20 … The conclusion? Be careful but not too much!
