Psychology

How I Used This Trick To Score Good In Exams

A brief description of a psychological phenomenon that dictates our beliefs without us realizing it

I remember my first duty in the emergency room with a picture as clear as my repugnance for the smokers who don’t respect the boundaries of non-smokers and blow the puff all over their faces.

A kid who had seized up with convulsions was brought in by frantic parents. The senior doctor on duty rushed to manage the patient after asking me to ring up the pediatrician quickly.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

As the child was looked after, I tried to call the pediatrician. The first step was to search for his contact number from a list of about twenty other doctors placed on the table and secured below a glass slab.

My amateur standards were conspicuously displayed by my inability to call the pediatrician for a full five minutes initially.

The senior doctor was visibly irate. Red as a tomato, she bombarded me with the choicest of adjectives. In one fell swoop, I was quickly labelled as the ‘inefficient intern’ who panics on seeing an emergency.

My only fault was that I was freshly minted from college and had arrived at the emergency room on the first day of my job. I didn’t know the names of the specialist doctors let alone remember the contact numbers by heart. And rummaging through the list took some time.

It wasn’t until a few months passed that I was able to refurbish my image.

Burning the fingers with the cliche ‘first impression is the last impression’ is an experience alien to none of us. Suffice to say on behalf of everyone, “Been there. Done that”.

In the circles of psychology, we call it the ‘halo effect’ and it is such a fundamental aspect of human psychology that not knowing about it in the 21st century is a shame on our water-cooler gossips. We can do better, right?

Let’s understand the Halo effect and how it influences our judgement by seeping in a bias that is difficult to realize at the moment when it happens.

The Halo effect is the tendency to like or dislike everything about a person — including the things that one has not observed — by just observing a mere one or two initial qualities.

A famous psychological experiment had subjects offer their opinions about two people, Alan and Ben, based on their descriptions:

Alan: Intelligent — Industrious — Impulsive — Critical — Stubborn — Envious

Ben: Envious — Stubborn — Critical — Impulsive — Industrious — Intelligent

A large majority of the population perceived Alan much more favorably than Ben.

The initial attributes change the meaning of the ones that appear later. The stubbornness of an intelligent chap is likely to be viewed in a positive light and may even evoke respect. On the other hand, intelligence in a stubborn and envious individual makes him dangerous.

The Halo effect increases the weightage of the first impressions.

I always say (to the indifference and I-will-kill-you-if-you-don’t-stop-talking reaction of my friends, though) that our brain loves to predict. It is that nerdy kid with big spectacles sitting on the first bench who goes ‘Oh I know that. It’s blah blah blah blah…..’ every time the teacher asks something. More precisely, even when she doesn’t ask something.

The genes running the brain cells have not forgotten the time when the bodies housing them were naked and ate raw flesh by getting their hands on anything and saving their arse from everything out there in the wild.

Photo by Sammy Wong on Unsplash

And so the brain predicts everything that it can from a vantage point of survival. Whatever way it makes sense of its surroundings and scans for potential danger, has helped our ancestors in the past to survive and reproduce in the jungle. Therefore, the genes for the same ended up in us.

This quirky little inevitable evil in the human brain gives off a certain fundamental similarity to the human psyche. How the intuitive aspect of our mind arrives at judgements with the speed of lightning — without any conscious thought — without putting in the effort to analyze the situation.
The rapidity with which you jump aside on the road when you see an incoming truck, has the phenomenon matched by the rapidity with which you arrive at judgements regarding a person by observing her initial attributes.

Halo Effect gazes at you with the presbyopic lenses of an aged evolutionary phenomenon.

When I think about it in retrospect, however, I realize that I had been unintentionally exploiting the Halo effect in my teachers while writing the exams.

Riddled with numerous psychological illusions though they were, the Halo Effect stood out amongst them all. Not for nothing do we have the stereotype of the teacher’s favorite.

Whenever it came to attempting answers, I always started from the last question in reverse. That’s because the weightage of the questions increased serially and the last questions had the maximum marks.
So, I used to attempt them in full detail by taking the maximum time possible. The subsequent questions (although the first in the series if one began with the right order) carried fewer marks and I could afford to offer a short synopsis for them if the time put a constraint.

Photo by Andrew George on Unsplash

It had the added advantage of tricking the examiner’s subconscious mind into believing that the answer presented initially was the true reflection of my knowledge and understanding. They often ended up giving me better marks for the rest of the questions.

Although I rarely met a student who attempted the questions like me, I decided to stick with my strategy forever and it did always float my boat.

This has been confirmed by the Nobel prize-winning cognitive psychologist ‘Daniel Kahneman’. In his book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, he describes how he used to grade his students’ answer booklets, checking one test booklet at a time, reading all the answers in a row. This ended up with him giving homogeneous marks for all the answers of every student based on the marks that he allotted to the first answer.

Upon recognizing this bias, the ingenuous professor adopted a new procedure. Instead of reading all the booklets in a sequence, he read and scored all the students’ answers to the first question, then proceeded to the next question, and so on.

This way, he negated the disproportionate effect that the first question had on the marking of the overall grade. The homogeneity disappeared, to his surprise.

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

First impression, I tell you, is no myth. The brain is hard-wired for that whether you like it or not. That’s just how the world works.

The Unknown Doctor