A Brain Tip to Improve Your Grades

There has been a fallacy that when writing your exams, stick to your first m answer.

Brain tip to improve your grades

Research tells the opposite of the statement. It gets said that believing the narrative of “first-instinct” leads to even more wrong answers as the brain is tied to believing that the initial response is the correct one.

But through research, it has been found that there can be new information to scrap off earlier conclusions made on a subject. There is a technique from algebra homework helpers that can help you get through this step, and it is known as confidence tracking, and here is how to use it:

  • When writing exams, input your confidence in every question and score it between 1-5. Do this before skipping to the next question
  • When you have gone through the paper, revisit your answers, and see if it is a better option to change or retain the responses that you have. 

How Confidence Tracking Works

It is the best way to gauge your confidence, and the advantage is that the brain is capable of making judgments immediately when you answer a question. It takes advantage of metacognition, which is the act of thinking without thinking. You get to analyze your beliefs and decisions. Metacognition also lets you understand when you do not know something. 

One flaw of this technique is that we cannot rely on our memories. The metacognitive abilities tend to decay as we try to remember events that occurred in the past. In a study conducted by Couchman, he and his partners decided to use a multi-choice exam to analyze how tracking an answer can affect the participants. During the first round:

  • Participants marked their answers with a G(guess) and K(known) before skipping on to the next question.
  • They placed a marker on the paper at any point when they revised an answer they had input. 

The results came out that the revisions were not correct in many numbers, especially the questions they labeled with G. 

On a second experiment, they had a change of plans that included:

  • Instead of writing a G or K, they were to label their levels of confidence using a scale of 1 – 5, as mentioned earlier in the text. 

The final results of this experiment turned out to be that the first answers were more often right that the revised answers that were later changed. 

I know you feel a little bit confused, but the contradictions in these results are the critical theme. It is clear that when we stick to the one rule of thumb that tells us to trust our guts or always change the answers any time you feel unsure about a response, most of the time, you will fall in the pit. 

The only way to beat this is to believe that there is no universal rule of thumb. When you utilize your confidence tracking, you are at a better place to become crisp and make better use of the tool. When writing an answer in the exam and you label a confidence score beside it, you will be using the metacognitive abilities of the brain. It allows you to pinpoint areas of doubt and areas of extreme confidence. When you do this several times during your assessments or main exams, you will find that you will make many correct choices. 

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