Enhancing MCQs using “No Guess option” for better evaluation

During corporate training programmes, evaluating participants via Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) is one of the easiest and time efficient approach. For L&D team, the scores from this evaluation is an important metric/KPI to quantify the effectiveness of the training programme.

Unless we explicitly request learners to skip answering questions they are unsure about, most will randomly select choices. This doesn’t help anyone.

How about adding a choice labelled “Sorry. I don’t know” (let’s call it as the No Guess Option) for all questions and meta-tagging each question to a specific topic(s)?. This will definitely help in the following ways

1. For each learner, we can identify topics that require further assistance
2. If most learners select the “no guess” option for a particular question, this clearly indicates that the topic(s) meta-tagged with that question are not clearly understood or covered. The trainer needs to change their teaching strategy for these topic(s). In very rare cases, the question/choices themselves could be wrong and need to be rectified)

Same holds good during recruitment process as well. Frankly admitting that “I don’t know” for a few questions, increases the credibility of the candidate. Post recruitment, we can customize the initial training programme for each candidate.