The Benefit of a Switch: Answer-Changing on Multiple-Choice Exams by First-Year Dental Students

The aim of this study was to determine if dental students would benefit from changing their initial responses to what they have deemed to be more suitable answers during high-stakes multiple-choice examinations. Students are often advised to stay with their first answers despite evidence from other fields suggesting this is not the best course for obtaining optimal final exam scores. Data were collected for 160 first-year DMD students in fall 2013 for three operative dentistry and four biochemistry exams at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine. As students take all of their exams through ExamSoft, a test-taking software application that tracks and records all changes students make during the exam period, the subjective nature of previous studies on answer changing was eliminated. The results showed that all students changed their answers on a minimum of nine questions over the seven exams, with an average of 26.55 (SD=8.8) questions changed per student. Answers changed from an incorrect to a correct response comprised nearly 65% of total answer changes, while changes from a correct to an incorrect answer encompassed slightly above 10% of answer changes. Nearly all students (99.4%) benefitted from answer-changing with a net gain of at least two correct questions, with only one student not increasing the final score. Overall, the students greatly benefitted from changing their answer choice, suggesting that dental students could be advised to change their answers from their first choice if they identify a better option when taking multiple-choice exams.