Mike Dougherty-384281 (11/9/2011)
The number of ways of answering correctly: 1The number of ways of answering incorrectly: many
The is no "partially correct" option. I might have complained about mixing 4 different ideas (and their negation) into the multiple-choice answer, but I thought "Grow up, these are professionals we're talking about" 🙂 So I'm sharing this thought to possibly explain why results are skewed to 9% correct.
I think there's also a psychological impact of 8 checkboxes - the answer seems simple enough, but then there's the second-guessing. After that first moment of hesitation, we're much less likely to check all (and only) the right boxes.
Anyway, I admit I was guessing at the answers - but I think this is a great example of an edge case of SQL ServerCentral Question of the Day. Maybe if more questions were written this way we'd be more accustomed to it?
I know multiple-answers questions are not the most popular, but in this case there are four obviously mutually exclusive answer pairs, so you are basically facing four yes/no questions combined into one question. I thought that would not be overly hard. Apparently, I was wrong. 🙂 (It's also intrigueing that for none of the yes/no pairs, the answers given add up to 100% - obviously, there are people who overlook both the "choose 4" in the question and the fact that the options are mutually exclusive so that there have to be four correct answers.
FWIW, the second question in this series will be a single-answer one (albeit with no less than seven options to choose from), and I just submitted the third question as a simple Yes/No question. I'll keep the rest on hold until I know how the second one is received, so that I can adjust the difficulty as needed.