Greetings from Team QEDRAK!

If, you have chanced upon this blog, we recommend that you first listen to the Podcast titled Get Set Choose with MCQs – Part 1, to familiarise yourself with the topic, before proceeding.

If, however, you have reached here AFTER listening to the podcast, then please continue reading. 😊

In the podcast, you heard about the structure of a MCQ, its purpose and tips on how to crack it. Here’s a visual support for the audio explanation:

As mentioned in the podcast, MCQs are of many styles – they can be textual (as above) or they could be image based or Reading Comprehension based among many others. Here are some examples of varied styles of MCQs :

Apart from the above examples, another style of MCQs popular in assessment papers today is the ASSERTION and REASON style.

Like conventional MCQs, Assertion-Reason (AR-MCQ) style of questions, belong to the genre of “objective tests”. i.e. its answer is pre-set so at the time of marking, no further judgement by the examiner is required regarding the correctness of the answer. YOU should know how to choose the right answer.

AR-MCQ style of questions have the following format:

• There are two statements (an Assertion & a Reason). Sometimes, the Assertion and/or Reason could include an image/s with some text.
• the statements are usually connected with ‘because’ (but not all the time)
• they have a true/false element
• they have the MCQ possible answers legend

Let us take a look at some examples:

NOTE: The number of MCQ options and the order in which the True-False statements appear in the options, can vary from exam to exam.

Now that you are familiar with some AR-MCQ questions, do you want to know how to master cracking AR-MCQ questions? Here goes :

Step 1: Determine whether the first statement i.e. the ASSERTION, is True or False (as a stand alone statement).

Step 2: Determine whether the second statement i.e. the REASON, is True or False (as a stand alone statement).

Step 3: If BOTH the statements are TRUE; then you can eliminate options c, d, e. You now need to focus on only options a and b.

Step 4: Now re-read the Assertion and the Reason very carefully. Determine whether the REASON is the correct explanation for the ASSERTION.

Step 5: If the REASON IS the correct explanation, then your correct choice would be option- a. But, if the REASON IS NOT the correct explanation, then the correct choice would be option- b.

We hope the podcast and this blog have truly geared you up to GET SET CHOOSE with MCQs. All the best !