In Dutch we call this "giscorrectie" (guess correction). Universities moved away from this system because it accidentally created gender inequality: turns out men are more likely to take a risk and guess when they're doubting between 2 answers, but women are more cautious and likely to leave the question blank. You'd think that would be an advantage for women, as they would be punished less for a wrong guess, but it actually meant that women would leave a question blank even if they were 90% certain their answer was correct. Now we use "verhoogde cesuur" (raised caesura?), which doesn't punish wrong answers but means you have to score e.g 60% to pass the exam.
From what I’ve seen, English uses a lot of German while Dutch uses the exact opposite half of German lol makes things look vaguely familiar but ultimately hard to understand
Maybe you're getting downvoted bc you're deliberately misinterpreting my comment for engagement 🤷. You can't just change behaviour by teaching people it exists. I rationally know giscorrectie disadvantages women, doesn't mean I'm more likely to guess when it's implemented. This is a structural gender difference that doesn't change just because you're taught it exists
Of course you are more likely to guess when it is implemented. There is literally zero downside! That is the entire reason the system was changed, to not punish guessing so that even extremely risk averse people will guess.
Do you really think women are incapable of learning to correctly guessing in situations they should if they are taught the math behind it?
Also I am not misinterpreting your comment at all. I am actually engaging with it beyond a surface level “yay we got rid of systemic discrimination everyone clap!”
The main reason I even responded was the “you would think” section. Like we had to just guess at it using heuristics (guessing danger, lose point bad). we couldn’t actually think things through using the math behind it.
If you guess each time you have a 75 % chance of losing points. If you never guess you have a 0% chance of losing points. If there are 20 questions, the guesser will average +5 -15 = -10 points. The non-guesser will get 0. This assumes they're all complete guesses and not a coin-flip after ruling out obviously wrong answers.
How do the guessers benefit from this tactic?
Edit: Bollocks, I didn't read the part about it being a guess between two answers. Both guessers and non-guessers have a likelihood of 0 on average then. I don't understand why they changed the system either.
You are assuming you gain or lose equal points for a correct guess and an incorrect guess. Every scoring system I have seen has you lose a fraction of a point for an incorrect guess, the most common amount being a quarter of a point.
Also even assuming you lose a full point, the commenter above presented a scenario where they were 90% sure about an option but still left it blank. Obviously not guessing in this scenario is an extremely poor decision.
Ah you're right, it's 1/n-1 points deducted so on average wild guessing 4 questions would give you 1 correct answer and 3 (x 1/3) wrong ones averaging out to 0. So if you can rule out one answer each time you're basically gambling 1 point gained versus 2/3 of a point lost. If you only guess once in the whole test you're statistically likely to lose rather than gain a point.
I never studied statistics (much like OP) so that could all be wrong. I've no idea why this system creates a gender divide, though, or why that's something that would need to be addressed.
If you only guess once in the whole test you're statistically likely to lose rather than gain a point.
When you lose, you lose a fraction of a point. When you gain, you gain a full point. Even if you are more likely to lose points, you are still better off guessing*.
never studied statistics (much like OP) so that could all be wrong. I've no idea why this system creates a gender divide, though, or why that's something that would need to be addressed.
I have studied statistics and what you are saying makes sense. I personally don't care about if there is a gender divide, just that there are students that don't understand the math behind guessing. The way to fix it is to teach the math behind how guessing works. It isn't to change the scoring system.
*assuming we are saying you lose a quarter point for incorrect guesses and you have eliminated one guess.
It's 1/3 of a point for a four-choice question apparently (-1/n-1 where n is the number of choices) so if you take one complete guess out of the whole test you're more likely to lose rather than gain a point. I don't know how probability works though, if you make two guesses the chances of getting one right go up a little but there's no guarantee of anything.
With 20 questions, the most likely outcome is 5 right, 25 wrong which gives 0 points gained or lost. But that's just a 20% likelihood. My brain can't wrap itself around 3D stats like that. I can't make out if it's a useful strategy for complete guesses.
The thing about being 90% sure of a question does my head in as well. It doesn't feel like a real probability. You're either right or wrong, in a way.
so if you take one complete guess out of the whole test you're more likely to lose rather than gain a point
This is not true. If you lose, you do not lose a full point. You lose a fraction of a point. If you only guess a single time there is no way to lose a full point.
With 20 questions, the most likely outcome is 5 right, 25 wrong which gives 0 points gained or lost. But that's just a 20% likelihood. My brain can't wrap itself around 3D stats like that.
If there are 20 questions there is no way to get 5 right and 25 wrong.
I can't make out if it's a useful strategy for complete guesses.
The math formula is E(X_1) = Σ [ x * P(X_1 = x) ]
lower case x is our possible values. Let's say we have 5 possibilities for a question, we get one point if we are right, and lose a quarter point if we are wrong. Plugging into the formula we get.
1*.2 + (-.25) * .8 = 0
So if we guess at random it is neither a good or bad strategy.
If we can eliminate 1 possibility it becomes 1 * .25 + (-0.25) * .75 = 0.0625.
At that point guessing is a better strategy.
The thing about being 90% sure of a question does my head in as well. It doesn't feel like a real probability. You're either right or wrong, in a way.
I mean kind of, but for our purposes it is close enough to real to matter. If I told you to guess who won the nba mvp in 2009 between me and Lebron there are only two possibilities. But even if you don't know much about basketball and you aren't 100% sure, you could still be more than 50% sure that it is likely lebron.
The gender disparity is why they went away from it. Even though once the solutions are reduced to two possibilities there is no statistical downside to guessing, it was found that a disproportionate amount of women were risk averse enough that they still wouldn’t guess. So the system ended up rewarding men for guessing and punishing women for not guessing, even though its initial intent was to discourage guessing in general. Also, guessing isn’t always a good strategy to encourage students to adopt, even when they’ve reduced the options to two. Real life consequences can make the refusal to guess a better decision even at 95% confidence. So yes a better understanding of statistics and the relevant circumstances would be ideal, but that wasn’t feasible, so they opted to change the grading system instead.
If guessing is an advantageous strategy (which it may be) then people should guess more. Them being male or female has no bearing on the outcome of using that strategy.
the dutch system they moved to encourages guessing much more than their old system. It no longer punishes wrong answers which heavily favors guessing. It favors it to such a degree that even extremely risk averse people start guessing every time.
If you want them to discourage guessing you need to move in the opposite direction, ie even more heavily punish incorrect guesses.
Is guessing on a multiple choice test at all comparable to a real life situation where the downsides to guessing incorrectly are catastrophic? Of course not. The system was set up so that random guessing was not rewarded. It makes sense that it should reward people who have eliminated incorrect answers.
Failing to correctly assess risk is something that can and should be taught. Throwing up our hands and saying well women are way too risk averse and they can't possibly understand the math behind it so we will just have change the system in the name of equality is laughable.
If that is the extent of the reasoning used, sure. If the disparity inspires a reevaluation of the values encouraged by the current grading process, that’s not a bad thing. As usual with statistics, the context of the data and viewpoint of the statistician are incredibly influential. Recognizing that the numbers may be telling a different story than you think is at least as important as the “to guess or not to guess” analysis you are focused on.
The context is quite clear. We have students not guessing in situations where guessing is the mathematically correct decision. The viewpoint of the statistician does not change this fact.
You mention values, but that is not the main problem. The problem is as mentioned above, students are not correctly analyzing the system and choosing the best strategy. We should be building this ability in students, not tweaking the system around them to line up with their current biases.
Now you can say, well the test is about dolphins so how good the students are at math should have no bearing on it, and to that I would say sure, change it to a zero penalty grading system then. But at the end of the day it is still a big problem that students can't understand when to guess vs when to leave a question blank.
What is the goal of the assessment at hand. Unless the course is statistics, probability, or game theory, incentivizing guessing by making it advantageous ever is actively working against the goal of properly assessing student knowledge of the course subject matter. Whether they should be taught how to analyze a situation to determine when to guess and when not to guess is irrelevant to the purpose of most course assessments.
Which is exactly what I said when I talked about dolphins…
Also you say incentivizing guessing by making it advantageous ever is actively working against the students.
But this is completely backwards. The system we are talking about removes the penalty from guessing and makes so they always guess! In fact it is so advantageous to guess that students no longer have to think. They just guess!
Except you then added the final sentence about how problematic it is that students don’t know when to guess. For a teacher, they get the most information about student knowledge when they never guess. Unfortunately, Goodhart’s law applies and test scores no longer can serve the purpose they were designed for.
Sounds like the system was working correctly. If you're 90% sure but unwilling to commit, you're score should be penalised for that. If women scored less, it's because they should, and needed to adjust their approach. Sounds like they just moved the goalposts rather than addressing the issue.
If we assume +1 point when correct and -1 point per incorrect choice, committing to a 90% chance gives you an average of 0.8 points compared to 0 points for a blank. Being even only 50% sure won't penalise you for guessing.
And I’m saying that an argument can be made that those should be structured in a way that is analogous to real-life reward vs penalty situations. Teaching someone to guess if they have a 50-50 chance (because most humans revert to habit rather than actually analyze every situation thoroughly) is not necessarily a good plan. It may be (often is) better to hold off on taking action until more information is available. Sometimes it is important to act even without full knowledge, but whether we should be encouraging that with our grade schemes is questionable.
You’ve both changed the scenario AND the probabilities at this point. Maybe you should reflect on what you’re reading before trying to gotcha people with your responses. Also a 90% confidence interval is wildly different from a 90% confidence level
I’m not trying to gotcha anyone. And a 90% confidence interval is so called because it allows you to have a 90% confidence level that it contains the true value. They’re not as wildly different as you seem to think.
You were right, and addressed all the points I would have. But Reddit and gender issues are a recipe for downvotes no matter which position you take :/
The ridiculous part is I am the one pushing for them to be educated so they can understand how to fix their approach. The downvoters are taking the paternalistic approach of women couldn't possibly understand how math works so let's get rid of the math part.
No, you see, they should get the same score as men, without having to change, If they have to be educated on the task at hand so they can improve, that implies they weren't already as good at the task from the beginning, which is sexist. Therefore the system is wrong and should be changed.
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u/musicismydrugxo 1d ago
In Dutch we call this "giscorrectie" (guess correction). Universities moved away from this system because it accidentally created gender inequality: turns out men are more likely to take a risk and guess when they're doubting between 2 answers, but women are more cautious and likely to leave the question blank. You'd think that would be an advantage for women, as they would be punished less for a wrong guess, but it actually meant that women would leave a question blank even if they were 90% certain their answer was correct. Now we use "verhoogde cesuur" (raised caesura?), which doesn't punish wrong answers but means you have to score e.g 60% to pass the exam.