You get your test back, and you can’t believe you got that one question wrong. You ask you prof, “Isn’t my answer correct?” and you show your prof the highlighted textbook passage that proves your case. Your prof says, “Yes, your answer is correct, but it’s not the best answer.” Your silent response: WTF??
The “best” answer: the bane of conscientious students. How are you supposed to judge what’s best and what’s merely right? What does it even mean for one correct answer to be better than another correct answer? For all of you who have fallen victim to the best, I offer this taxonomy of the less-than-best.
- The uninterestingly true answer. Any halfway decent exam question is trying to get at some halfway interesting scientific point. If you read an answer to which your first reaction is, “Duh,” keep looking for better answers. Look for the most interesting (and by interesting, I mean most relevant to other scientific concepts and explanations) answers. Hint: interestingness is occasionally positively correlated with wordiness. Example: Oxygen is (a) a substance, (b) an element, or (c) a highly electronegative element.
- The partially true answer. If an answer gets at only part of what’s interesting about some concept, expect other answers also to be correct — and then look for an answer that reads, “All of the above,” or, “A, C, and D are true.” Example: Ribosomes are (a) made of amino acids, (b) made of carbohydrates, (c) made of RNA, or (d) made of amino acids and RNA.
- The accidentally true answer. Deserts (a) tend to have high biodiversity, (b) can be found at high latitude, (c) have very low precipitation, or (d) have intermediate to high precipitation. Clearly (c) is correct. But the Antarctic polar desert is also a desert, so (b) is also technically correct. Will your prof remember that there’s a desert at 90 degrees south? It depends on what sort of class it is, but I guarantee that the prof remembers that deserts have low precipitation. So choose (b) at your own risk. You might get the points or not, but at least you’ll know deep down that you got it right.
The main thing to keep in mind is that you must read all of the choices before choosing one. Don’t despair of having to read the prof’s mind, because you don’t have to. Simply remember that scientists are less concerned with true and false than they are with more interesting and less interesting.
