Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on Scruton. Also picking up Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything.
Minds.
Specifically, the minds of the awkward creatures who write the MRCPsych questions, filtered through third party study materials and question banks (who go off the recollections of the depressed students leaving the exam hall, not primary sources).
Why? I find that ~half of my nominal error rate arises from a game of "what did the examiner fucking mean by that?" Multiple potentially correct answers is the least of it, I just ran into the conjunction fallacy in the wild.
A child presents with {symptoms}, which can be caused by diseases A, B or A+B (as presented by options for answers).
Which of these is the most likely diagnosis?
Well, A+B can't be more likely than A or B by themselves right? Feminist librarians are rarer than librarians.
Or so the sane would think. Alas.
As Szasz said "insanity is a sane response to an insane world". He's listed in my notes as a notable antipsychiatry advocate, and I'm beginning to believe he has a point.
(You can rescue the question by saying it's violating the rules of English instead of probability, but it's the kind of intervention pediatricians would counsel against)
Your answer is correct.
Difficulty in conceiving may place significant stress on a couple, and there's the potential for a wide spectrum of psychological struggles to ensue.
The correct answer is: All of the listed options
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I don't want to be right at the cost of my sanity.
I don't remember the probability classes I took, but I think I know what's going on here. The probability of one of the answers being true is smaller than the probability of all the answers being true, but the probability of one answer being true and all the others being false is even lower.
So P(All) is bigger than P(N and only N), but smaller than P(N)
The thing is, I believe the standard interpretation would be which specific outcome is most likely in such exams.
For example, a question that offers 5 side-effects for clozapine and asks for most common one will expect a single choice (and usually not have an all of the above option).
The question doesn't directly imply that the choices are mutually exclusive, thought the presence of an "all" option is suggestive (to someone who has picked up the vibe). A more sane option would be simply to ask "which of the following is commonly seen?", where all of them is clearly the correct choice.
"All of the above" should be the default answer for any medical multiple choice questions, It Is Known.
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I can't disagree with any of that. If you're being graded by a human (and not a dumb set of rules), you can write a justification for your answers on the page (e.g. assumptions made, definitions used).
Quizzes cannot measure reality very well because they lack nuance (e.g. the MBTI). Which is probably why a professional is needed to diagnose mental illness - the answer sheet alone is not enough.
And frankly, a lot of questions are stupid, and the goal of quizzes (to reverse answers back into specific categories) fails completely as it's not a reversible function. These exams measure alignment of thinking more than they measure competence. You'll be punished by the difference in thinking, measured as the distance to the average opinion of those who created the exams. They cannot tell the more competent apart from the less competent, they look the same
One solution is for there to be no multiple-choice, but rather a text field that one can write in. But the fairness of such a quizz is still limited by the competence of the grader, their ability to understand you, and their impartiality. I have personal experiences with all of these possibilities
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That kind of "all of the above" and "none of the above" is generally seen as bad assessment.
For various reasons, but the former because if you can dismiss even one as wrong you can guess that "all of the above" isn't correct even if you're not sure of some others. It's like wasting a distractor. It adds unnecessary noise. Likewise if "none of the above" is correct, you know what the student knows is wrong but you don't know if they know what is right.
Often enough people who have no idea about item-response theory, test analysis, teat validity, or test reliability are involved in test creation and they end up making extremely bad tests.
Edit: That's "test validity" but I'll leave it for humor's sake.
"But Doctor, instrumental validity and test analysis/reliability are explicit parts of the exam syllabus!"
Not kidding. It's there. You'd hope the people making the exam would understand that better; the Royal College claims that every question in the exam goes through careful vetting, but I suspect they're the kind of vets that hang around kennels.
Questions being difficult or relying on arcane knowledge is one thing. Being malformed is a step too far.
Since I'm already talking about bad questions:
I've steeped myself in exam-speak enough to know that collectivism is the right answer. But really?
Wait, you’re being asked this in a medical exam?
Yes. The exams run by the Royal College of Psychiatry, to be specific. Why Civics for People Who Failed Civics 101 is included is beyond my comprehension.
The official breakdown of marks is useless. The ratio, as far as I can tell is:
50% clinically relevant information (generous)
25% Why do they feel like I need to know this?
25% An ungodly assortment of antimemes and cognitohazards masquerading as multiple choice questions. Questions that have me questioning myself, or at least my life decisions.
I paid £500 for an exam with a 44% pass rate, I deserve better :(
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