Seduction of the right answer

We are trained from a very early age at home and at school that questions have right and wrong answers. If we provide the right answer to a question, we are rewarded with a smile, a cookie, or a good grade on an assignment or a report card. Incorrect answers may result in anything from a sigh, followed by a repeated request for the correct answer, to severe, potentially career changing, penalties.

The emphasis that we place on the right answer has some advantages. It allows children and students to learn basic information without overwhelming them. It`s enough for a quarter to be worth 25 cents. Unless you have a very precocious 5-year-old who reads the New York Times and is closely following the U.S. credit meltdown, she probably doesn`t need to know about the global currency markets and inflation right now. Right answers make grading assignments and exams simple for educators and standardized testing agencies. There are certainly times when we want to actively discourage debate. (Don`t run with scissors. Look both ways before crossing the street. If you don`t know what it is, you shouldn`t be eating it.) And indeed, some questions have a single, indisputable, correct response. 2 + 3 = 5 even if you are standing on the moon or hanging upside down from a playground swing set. But overall, I think that the risks far outweigh the rewards.

There are remarkably few things in life that only have one right answer. There is more than one right way to tie shoe laces. (I know of two. A sailor, a scout, or a surgeon could provide you with a dozen more.) There is certainly more than one way to design and build a bridge. The only thing that matters is that you successfully accomplish your goals without violating any constraints. By emphasizing the single right answer, we actively discourage creativity and the pursuit of all other answers and all other possible ways to achieve our goals. This blocks the road to progress and innovation, and can ultimately hurt society and the economy.

Emphasizing the right answer can encourage students to focus on the metrics of success (scores, grades, etc.) to the exclusion of all else. In the humanities and social sciences, assignments are often given to help students learn to make arguments and support them with evidence. Here, there is no right or wrong answer. There are only logical, well supported arguments and incomprehensible musings. Despite this, students will sometimes go to great lengths to determine the teacher`s opinion on a given subject, and then write a paper based on that opinion to maximize the probability of receiving a good grade. They are not only subjugating their opinions for the sake of the "right" answer, they are risking their education and their future. Taken to extremes, this obsession can lead good students to do very bad things. Nearly 100 students recently had their GMAT scores canceled and their hopes of attending business school dashed (probably permanently) because they subscribed to a test preparation website that gave them access to "live" questions still being used in the test. Would you risk your reputation and your career for the sake of being right?

Emphasizing right answers discourages questioning and critical thinking and can lead to blind acceptance of (potentially incorrect) information. As children, we accept that everything we are taught is true. We treat information as fact, correct and indisputable, and we happily repeat it back to our teachers in class and during examinations. But there was a time when everyone in the world accepted the fact that the world was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth, and that Pluto was a planet. When your parents told you that you can`t believe everything that you`re told, they weren`t kidding. Doing so can hold back the frontiers of knowledge.

Finally, the seductive right answer is simplicity itself in a complicated world - a cruel parody of what is to come in life after school. The world is not full of right and wrong answers. The world is full of options: some better, some worse. It is full of decisions, opinions, and ambiguity. Industry does not need employees who can memorize and repeat facts. They most certainly don`t need people to repeat their opinions back to them. They need people who can think, learn, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate. Yes, allowing ambiguity into the classroom makes education more difficult. Yes, there will be times you wish that your toddler would just stop asking "why" and mercifully go watch television. But we as individuals, as societies, and as a world pay the price for preparing students for a black-and-white world and then throwing them into living color.





Mary Kathryn Thompson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. She can be reached at mkthompson@an.kaist.ac.kr. - Ed.