Incentivising Metacognition with Probabilistic Grading

The vast majority of grading exams that contain true-false and multiple choice questions encourages students to guess. This leads to two issues: the first is it incentivizes students to be overconfident rather than honestly quantify their level of belief and the second is that instructors cannot see which questions students are certain about versus these where students guess. This paper explores how Probabilistic Grading solves these issues, encouraging students to be honest about their true beliefs and discouraging them from guessing. Probabilistic Grading evaluates both cognition and metacognitive reflection simultaneously, teaching students to become aware of the sources of their uncertainty and encouraging them to be self-directed learners.