In response to our recent podcast called “Why Is ‘I Don’t Know’ So Hard to Say?,” a reader named Timothy McCollough writes in with a most interesting story. He teaches at a private international school in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. His courses include two sections of AP microeconomics, sociology, and “regular economics.” Because it’s a private school, he adds, “we have freer reign to set up classroom incentives and engage students as we see fit.” For instance:
In my classroom, students lose 1/4 point for wrong answers on quizzes. But for writing “I don’t know,” they get 1/4 point. (A correct answer is 1 point). The rationale is that if someone is in a medical emergency, and someone asks me what should be done, the answer “I don’t know” is much preferable to a guess. “I don’t know” leads the questioner to ask someone who hopefully is knowledgeable.
Part of why “I don’t know is so hard to say” stems from an education system based on attempting every single question, whether you know the answer or not.
P.S.: End-of-year student survey showed students strongly supported the +1/4 point IDK and -1/4 point wrong-answer system.
I have to say, I very much like to see this kind of creativity in a teacher, any teacher, at any level.
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I believe this is a great approach for collegiate education, but not necessarily in grade school. I could see it working in an advanced gifted/talented class…but not as a role in all classes. The question of applying this broadly aside, the point of the article is that being able to say “I don’t know” instead of trying to BS your way through a response is a life skill that we should do more to reach our kids. And our adults. It is one part humility and one part intellectual curiosity, both of which are seriously lacking today.
I have taught college and grade school using this approach. Grade school students liked the opportunity to ask questions that they did not know the answer to in class and at lunch. They kept on coming back for more. Grades on standardized tests went up in the short period of time that I taught there. Not everyone came to lunch. This was their choice. My point, progressive education has a point- just has not been well thought out (the integration of the old and new in a way that meets both individual needs and interests and objective measures of whether or not students learned and understand why 1+1 of anything =2…. Not everyone wants to be a mathematician, but everyone needs to know how to add and subtract and divide. I recall this story once told to me of someone who found an error in their bank account of over 100,000 in their favor. The bank made the error. He told the bank about it. Imagine not being able to sort such errors out. People get cheated all the time for lack of the ability to add simple numbers. There are a host of different sorts of situations where this applies.
I can understand taking away 1/4 for a wrong answer to discourage guessing, but giving 1/4 for saying “I don’t know”? That’s just silly. Why not just give 0 points if they leave the answer blank (which is essentially “I don’t know”)? That way, you’re encouraged not to guess randomly, yet you’re also not rewarded for not knowing the answer.
Plus if I were in school, it would infuriate me that someone like me, who worked really hard, could be getting 1/4 points off for making genuine attempts at answering the question, yet getting them wrong, while someone who blew off studying and showed up to class having done nothing could write “I don’t know” on practically everything and still possibly get the same or even a better grade than me. I am making an honest attempt at learning material and could just be struggling on that particular test. The other guy is just being lazy. Do I deserve to be put on the same level as someone who did the bare minimum?
Also, medical emergencies are not the same as tests in school. Tests are designed to gauge how much of the material you understand, track your progress, and make sure that you fully comprehend everything that you have been given over a long period of time. In a medical emergency, answering a question is not about comprehension or understanding material. It’s about how to react to a situation. Surely students are not that stupid as not to know the difference between saying “I don’t know” on a test, where they could be taking the lazy way out or just giving up too easily, and an emergency, where there is no need to attempt to guess?
Katie,
I started with the -1/4-point for wrong answers to discourage random guessing. But the problem is that it does not discourage it enough!
For multiple choice questions with 5 possible answers (like the SAT), a student is encouraged to guess if she can eliminate one answer.* I wanted to tweak the system to get lower the instances of random guessing and to increase honest answers. I was not satisfied when students would be encouraged to randomly guess between 4 possibilities. Where in life is guessing at four possibilities a good thing? Wouldn’t we rather have a person honestly say “I don’t know which of those four answers is correct”?
Don’t you think that the real world penalizes guessing? If you need to drive to a new person’s home, and you don’t know where the person lives, don’t you find that the real world punishes you for “making genuine attempts” to find the house when you don’t know, rather than saying “I don’t know where that person lives”, and then maybe taking some sensible action based on your lack of knowledge?
And don’t you think that saying “I don’t know” when you really don’t know is actually more honest than trying to deceive the teacher about your lack of knowledge through guessing?
In Australia there’s a country wide Primary/Secondary school mathematics competition that has used a similar system, they’ve jigged it a few times but it always involved the same concept of penalising random guessing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Mathematics_Competition
Hey Freakonomics community!
To clarify, the -1/4-pt. wrong answer, +1/4-pt. “I don’t know” system is for the multiple choice section of quizzes. My students are college-bound juniors and seniors. Mathematically, this works out so that students should only guess if they can narrow the answers to two choices. Result: less blind guessing (and more honesty).
The IDK response also gives me valuable data as a teacher. Knowing which questions resulted in the most IDKs provides instant feedback to which concepts need immediate re-teaching; and knowing which kids wrote the most IDKs tells me, with more accuracy, who is underachieving and what their needs are.
re: James’ comments, this system doesn’t alter the incentives for students to learn and “get it right.” If a student does nothing and guesses at every question, she’d get 25% of all questions correct by random chance in a normal system. Under my system, she could write IDK for all questions, and get the same 25%. The difference: I know exactly what she “does not know.”
– Tim
PS When I give retakes, I take the average of the retake grade and the original score. This way, students can improve their grade with improved understanding, but are still held accountable for their first failure.
VERY good point about the feedback.
Back when I took the CPA exam, when it was hand written and no calculators allowed, the system for the multiple choice sections was +1 for each correct answer, 0 for each no answer, and -1/4 for each wrong answer.
It was designed to discourage people from hurriedly randomly completing the multiple choice sections at the very end of the timed exam period.
Ya, but if I can get more than 25% of the answers I guess on correct, then it’s still a net win to answer them all. And in most multiple choice tests there’s only 4 answers and 1 of them is obviously wrong, so even just blind guessing when eliminating the 1 obvious solution is a “good” idea.
I kind of disagree with “if someone is in a medical emergency, and someone asks me what should be done, the answer “I don’t know” is much preferable to a guess.”
If you are in a dire emergency situation and just dont do anything because you arent sure what to then you are screwed. I mean guessing and taking action is better than sitting around saying “I don’t know”
Think about if you were being shot at for example, you would just stand around because you dont know what to do, you would act, and run or do something.
To be fair, let’s make “being shot” analogous to a multiple choice question, where one answer is correct (or helpful in this situation) and the answers are incorrect (or unhelpful).
QUESTION: You have been shot. Assuming you remain conscious and able, what is the first thing you should do?
A) Use tweezers to extract the bullet.
B) Chase down the assailant.
C) Call 9-11.
D) Cauterize the wound with gin and a hot poker.
E) I don’t know.
If you didn’t know the answer was C, you should choose E, “I don’t know.” That doesn’t mean you sit there, not knowing what to do, bleed out and die. Admitting you don’t know would likely lead to calling your friend; or yelling, “HELP! I’ve been shot and I don’t know what to do!!”; or– in very 2012 fashion– Googling, “What to do if you’ve been shot.”
Your other option is to blindly guess. 25% of the time, you’ll end up choosing “Call 9-11.” But most of the time you’ll wind up dead after an unsuccessful attempt to reenact a scene from Wyatt Earp.
One of my college economics professors (the department chair, no less) awarded 10 or 20% (I forget which) for leaving problems on his midterms/finals blank. There was enough time so that it was unlikely people would have to leave things blank simply for not having enough time.
His rationale, however, was slightly different: he didn’t want to have to waste his time or his TAs for things people dont know. He probably also felt partially the same as the DR teacher not wanting to reward pure guesses and training people to ask those who know, but, true to his field, he was a rational, utility-seeking being.
The students were mixed, however — I thought it was unfair for students to do expected value calculations on their sureness of the answer — they should just get the points for what they put down.