Sunday, December 9, 2007

The General Formula for Informed Guesses

As I'm graduating from university pretty soon. It is necessary that I pass the knowledge I gained to the new generation. Don't think I'll give some study tips or anything like that. Instead I'll be focusing on the situation where you have to guess MCQs (happens all the time for me).

Lots of students go about guessing in different ways. The obvious way is to guess the same letter for all the questions that you don't know i.e all A's or B's etc. However this technique doesn't work when the number of questions you have to guess is small and non continuous.

Informed Guess Explanation:

After long discussions with fellow Informed Guess (IG) users (a.k.a my roomate), we have finally came to the General Formula for Informed Guesses. The formula goes this way:

1. Choose some kind of lyrics or childish song you used to like when you were a child. It has to be short so you don't waste much time. Examples) 7agrah Bagrah, Einy Meny etc..

2. Compute the starting choice by this equation
S = (Q mod N)+1 where
S is the starting choice number
Q is the question number
N is the number of choices (after elimination if you happen to know anything about the question)
mod is the remainder operation 1 mod 5 is 1 and 7 mod 5 is 2.

3. Apply the lyrics to the choices using 1 word for each choice starting from the choice number you got from step 2.

4. Circle the choice where the rhythm ends.

Example:

Q8. Do you think this article is useful?
A. Yes B. No C. Can't decide. D. I haven't read it.
E. choice D doesn't make sense since you are reading this.

To answer the question above (if you don't know the answer of course) let's follow the steps:
1. I choose a 4 word lyrics (undisclosed for security reasons).
2. S = (8 mod 5)+1 => S = 4.
3. I start from choice D going 4 steps since the lyrics is 4 words.
4. I circle choice C.