Multiple Choice Question Strategies for Accountants
As an accounting student, it is imperative that you understand how to take a test that has multiple choice questions. For the foreseeable future, multiple choice questions will be a vital part of academia, the CPA exam, and continuing professional education (CPE) courses. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my many years as a student, professional, and instructor, it’s that not everyone is naturally great at taking multiple choice tests. Even the smartest students can struggle with the challenges posed by the format. Today, I am going to share some key test taking strategies and things to watch out for when taking multiple choice tests as an accounting student and professional. Let’s jump in!
The Questions
Your experience with multiple choice questions starts with the questions! Before we look into examining the potential answers, it is essential to identify the key characteristics of the questions. Here’s a couple things to keep in mind:
The Call of the Question - Especially on the CPA exam, you may encounter some questions that are quite wordy and have a lot of information in them. Before you go reading the entire question, skip to the bottom and find the call of the question, which is what the question is actually asking you to respond with. Not only will this help you better identify what information is most important for solving the problem, but it can also help you filter out the information that may not be relevant to your particular question. This strategy alone saved many valuable minutes when I was taking the CPA exam.
Read the Full Question (when necessary) - Unless you are able to confidently scope out most of the information in the question using the above strategy, it’s a good idea to read the entire question to capture all of the context. In many cases, most (if not all) of the context provided in the question can influence your answer choice, and omitting or misinterpreting one part can lead you to selecting the wrong answer!
One Word Changing Everything - This is the thing that messes up the most people! MCQ questions are constructed in a way where there may only be one answer to the question. However, it’s vital to understand what that question is! It only takes ONE WORD (or a few words) to change the core of the question being asked. If you are reading the question too quickly and skim over these words, you may fundamentally misunderstand the question and pick the wrong answer. Here are a few examples of language to look out for:
“Which of the following is the MOST LIKELY…”
“Which of the following is the LEAST LIKELY…”
“Which of the following is the NOT…”
“What is TRUE about…”
“Which of the following answers is FALSE…”
For these questions especially, reading the question twice in your head is a great way to help prevent misreading the call of the question.
The Answers
Now let’s look to the answers (and sometimes back to the question):
Always and Never - In accounting especially, we live in the world of “it depends.” This means that answers choices containing “always” or “never” tend not to be correct answers in most circumstances. When you think about it, this makes sense because using these terms implies that there are no exceptions to the statement that is being presented as an answer, and it only takes one exception to make that statement false. Be on the lookout for these words in your answers because they are not likely to be the correct answer!
Plug and Chug - When you encounter a question that has all numerical answers, you may have a “plug and chug” problem on your hands. Depending on the nature of the problem, you can either plug in the numbers from the question to solve the problem normally and see if your answer is in the available choices, or you can start from the answers and work backwards. While this method may be a bit more time consuming, it requires no thought other than the knowledge of how to solve the problem. This strategy is especially useful when you need to conserve some brain power for a question that requires more critical thinking skills.
Two of the Same Answer - If two of the answers are numerically equivalent, they are the same answer. In a MCQ test where there can only be one answer, neither of the answers can be correct because that implies that there are two answers. Therefore, they both must be wrong. This won’t come up too often, but understanding the logic to this way of problem solving is essential to becoming better at taking MCQ tests. It’s also a free 50/50 in most cases!
Connotations and Implications - Some questions ask the question in a very specific way that informs what answer choices are appropriate. The most common example that I’ve seen is where the connotation of the answer is implied in the question. An example of a question like this is: “What is one advantage of implementing XXX.” Most of the time, 2 or more of the answers to this question spell out clear disadvantages, not advantages. In many cases, the wording of these answers is so clear that even someone without the background knowledge can tell which answers are a disadvantage, and which answers are advantages. In these cases, understanding the connotation or implication of the question can do some or most of the work for you!
Test Taking and Studying Strategies
Finally, let’s examine some answering and studying strategies. These are best utilized when you have a bank of questions where you can check your answer against the correct answer.
Process of Elimination - Using the answer analysis strategies from above, you can quickly narrow down some answer choices through the process of elimination. By taking the definitely wrong answers out of the question pool, you are able to focus on finding the differences that identify the correct answer. While this is definitely the oldest trick in the book for MCQs, it is usually an effective way to navigate yourself to a more correct answer.
Why are the Other Answers Wrong? - Many MCQs tend to have patterns in their answers, especially when it comes to questions that are testing definitions of certain terms. If there’s only one right answer to a definition of a word, the writers of the question need to make the alternative answers clearly wrong in some way. Typically, this is achieved by changing a part of the description in every answer such that each of the meanings becomes different. A great way to learn from these questions is to write down why each of the alternatives is incorrect. For example:
Answer A switched two words and that fundamentally changed the response compared to the right answer
Answer B is the definition of a term that is commonly taught with this term.
Answer C describes the opposite of the term the question is asking for.
Answer D is correct.
Use the Rest of the Test! - By their nature, MCQ tests allow instructors to test on a wider range of subjects and ask more questions because of the time saved taking the test. As a result, you are likely to encounter more information provided in the test’s questions compared to other formats. An excellent strategy you can use whenever you get stuck on a problem is to move on and hope that another question in the test provides some additional context around the subject to help you find the answer to the question you were stuck on.
Tips from the Professionals
In doing my research for this article, I asked a number of accounting colleagues and friends to weigh in on their experiences. In addition to the wisdom they have in the areas covered already, they stressed the importance of repetition in the process of studying using MCQs. By combining a conscious approach of understanding why the other answers are wrong with a large volume of questions, they were able to develop some pattern recognition with the questions which saved them valuable time reading some questions that were used to solve some other harder questions. If these strategies worked for us, they can work for you too!