Abstract

Multiple-choice tests are among the most widely used test formats throughout the world due to their ease of administration and other advantages; however, one of the shortcomings of this test format is the role of guessing inherent in it. To solve this problem, different scoring methods have been proposed. Confidence-based scoring is a scoring method that both removes uninformed guesses from multiple-choice tests and takes partial knowledge into account. This scoring method, however, has been criticized for being biased against gender and specific personality traits. The present study was an attempt to examine the self-esteem and gender bias of confidence-based scoring compared to number-right scoring while testing English grammar. The participants were forty-nine freshman students who were taking their English grammar course. At the end of the semester, they were given an eighty-item multiple-choice test based on the content of the course. The test was scored in two ways: confidence-based scoring and number-right scoring. The participants were also given the Self-Esteem Inventory. To examine the self-esteem bias of these two scoring methods, Pearson correlation was used. To investigate their gender bias, the means of scores in male and female participants were calculated, and the significance of the difference was tested by independent-samples t-test. The results showed that both confidence-based scoring and number-right scoring were biased against self-esteem. In other words, confidence-based scores were no more biased than number-right scores against self-esteem. The results also showed that neither confidence-based scores nor number-right scores were biased against gender.