EFFECT OF ANXIETY ON PERFORMANCE IN MULTIPLE-CHOICE EXAMINATION

Negative scoring of incorrectly answered multiple choice questions has logistic advantages, but may disadvantage anxious students. We theref ore attempted to observe the effects of positive and negative marking of true/false questions on the examination performance of medical stud ents with different levels of anxiety. Third-year medical students (14 1 men, 71 women) completed a Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory before an examination in pathology in 1994. Students knew there would be penalties for wrong answers in the first half of the examination a nd no penalties in the second half. Performance on the two halves was compared and effects of levels of anxiety assessed. Students reported slightly higher trait anxiety than American norms. Women students repo rted higher levels of state anxiety than men, and levels for both gend ers were indicative of a moderately stressful situation. Trait anxiety was not associated with performance in either the negatively or posit ively marked halves of the examination. For women students, but not me n, lower state anxiety was positively associated with higher performan ce on the negatively marked half of the examination (r = 0.29), but ac counted for only 8% of the variance in scores. In our study, anxiety w as correlated only slightly with results of a negatively marked examin ation. We conclude that anxious medical students are not unduly disadv antaged by this method of marking.