Im sorry, 200 questions does not test your knowledge

[Curious3141]

What do you say about 125 math questions in 90 minutes ?
That's less than 1 minute per question and I attempted this monster test just a week ago .
What kind of sick sadists make tests like these ?

Depends on the level of difficulty. For average "A" level or high school questions, I think that's perfectly doable.

A lot of Mathematical competitions have time/question ratios like those and the questions are of real difficulty.

 

[Stingray]

It gets really scary when you get to grad school and take an upper level statistics course with FOUR questions to be answered in 3 hours.

Pretty much every test I had as an undergrad was like that: 3-6 questions in 3-5 hours. I didn't realize it was that unusual.

 

[Moonbear]

We had something like 200 questions on all our Med School undergrad exams, what was worse was that negative marking was employed with equal bias. (+1 for a right answer, -1 for a wrong answer and 0 for an unanswered question).

They use that sort of marking on the MCAT exams here...those are the exams you take for admission to med school (med school here is a post-graduate professional program, not an undergrad major). But, yeah, the idea is that if you are just going to guess, it's better to not answer the question, and if you are giving an answer and are confident enough to chance the negative points, then it's worse to not know you don't know the answer than to be aware of your lack of knowledge...I guess. Such an exam format doesn't test your knowledge so much as your test-taking skills...and maybe how good of a gambler you are, as every question that you're uncertain of, you have to decide if it's worth chancing a wrong answer or more likely you're going to get it right.

I'd love to see someone change the formats on med school exams to include some non-multiple guess questions. Make them actually think through an essay answer once in a while. But, since the board exams are all multiple guess, they gear everything toward those. I always preferred a mixed format. Cover the breadth of knowledge with multiple choice questions, then ask one or two essay/short answer questions to test depth of knowledge.

 

[Gokul43201]

I like a scoring system with a little more of a penalty than -1/3 for a wrong answer (4 choices per question). That way, the average score on all the randomly guessed answers is negative and serves as a deterrent against guessing. A 0 net score on random guesses (when -1/3 is awarded for wrong answers) provides no incentive against guessing (other than megavariophobia - the fear of large fluctuations)

I once had a teacher that gave you +1 for a correct answer and -1000 for a wrong one. You didn't answer unless you were 99.9% sure.