Comments on: Multiple choice medical school exams favour male students

By: heaven_poet

heaven_poet — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:45:29 +0000

i disagree with test with multiple choice
i think it just about luck
if we have a good luck we can get a good value
very bad test

By: Helen Jaques

Helen Jaques — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:18:12 +0000

Thanks for the comments guys. The whole ‘men take more risks’ aspect of this research is quite interesting, although these authors’ results can’t really add anything to that particular debate. They’d need to do some kind of nested psychometric study to determine the risk-taking characteristics of the sample before they could draw any conclusions I reckon.

I’m less sure about the possibility that girls don’t take risks in biomedical MCQ exams because they’ve been conditioned to believe they’re hopeless at the subject. It would be interesting to see if the pattern is similar in a different discipline to see whether the confidence of women in their answers is affected by society’s view of the academic subject, although I’m guessing female-dominated subjects like the arts have essay-based rather than MCQ-based exams.

By: jemand

jemand — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:34:14 +0000

hmm…. I’ve always done extraordinarily well on “multiple choice/abstain” tests, and I’m female, HOWEVER, I was homeschooled as a child and actually never encountered the “girls aren’t as good as boys at math” theory until well into my teens. So I was never afraid to guess, because by that time my self-confidence in my abilities was already settled.

But girls who have been subtly told they “aren’t as good” at a particular field are DEFINITELY going to feel a bit more hesitant on whether or not their answers are correct… and thus more likely to “abstain.”

So I don’t think this is really at all a basic gender divide but rather the logical response to being told you aren’t expected to do as well…

By: Jr

Jr — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:00:20 +0000

Interesting result if it can be replicated. There have been studies before concluding that in similar circumstances men appear to be more confident/risktaking. This seems to be the case here, since the women abstained more and this drove the result.

If one wanted to keep the format and insisted on statistical equality one could presumably increase the punishment for answering wrong to equalize the result. I found the following quote from the paper amusing: “The explanation for this phenomenon is not clear but the common argument used is that it is associated with the greater risk taking behaviour of males. However, it could be equally due to the more cautious behaviour of females or different problem solving strategies.”

Apparently males being more risk taking is a different theory than females being more cautious.