A Written Test Trap to Avoid

April 13, 2015
Many fire exam takers are impacted by the Illusion of Knowledge, where one believes they know an answer based on previous uncertainty.

As firefighters, we spend most of our time dealing in the physical world. But sometimes even we have to take a dip into the world of psychology. This is one of those times.

There is a particular psychological trap inside each of us that affects our lives every day in more ways than you would imagine, and we never think about it or even notice it. Yet one of the serious effects it has is to sabotage us on a written test. It’s the Illusion of Knowledge. And it’s not trivial.

It begins with our intolerance for uncertainty. (Don’t worry this is as deep as it gets.) People hate not knowing. Sometimes we can’t even stand it. So we don’t. We make something up. It is amazing really, that we do that at all, when you hear it said right out loud like that, and it is equally amazing how often we do it and don’t even notice.

We’re reading a thing, or don’t quite hear a word someone says in conversation. That produces a sudden “bridge-out” condition – a disconnect. Our understanding is brought to an abrupt stop, as if we were driving a car and saw that the bridge up ahead had collapsed. We can’t get past it. We’re stuck. That is enormously vexing and it might happen 10 times in a day, sometimes 10 times before lunch.

So what we do is, either explicitly or, more subtly, automatically, we think, “Well, it’s probably this." Or, “well, it must be that.” We speculate. And that allows us to proceed. You hear a noise in the night – you can either stay awake all night, go find out what it was (good luck) or leave the question unanswered. But we can’t stand to leave a question unanswered. So what do we do? Ah, it’s probably the ice-maker. Ah, it’s probably the … whatever. Something. But we do assign it to be something. That all sounds harmless enough.

But what happens after that is really quite sinister. The speculation is entered in our mental log book. And anything entered in our mental log book then takes on the property of “something familiar to us.” So next time the topic comes up and we quickly scan our memory to see if we know about it, we find something in there. Something familiar to us. Ah, I know that.

No. You don’t. But you feel as though you do. That is the sinister thing about speculation. It doesn’t stay speculation. It mutates into “something known.” Then the next time we scan our memory it shows up as something known. But it’s not something known. We never knew it. We only guessed at it. So how come it shows up now as something known?

You know how they put an odor into natural gas so we can smell it? Mercaptan I think it is. But you could put mercaptan into anything, any gas. And what would happen? People would naturally think it was natural gas they were smelling. In fact, you could even pour some mercaptan on the ground, with no other gas, and people would be calling in gas leaks for the next four hours. They had a tanker of that wreck somewhere in Canada a couple of years back and people were calling in a smell of gas for a hundred miles.

It’s the same principle here. When we speculate about something, it allows us to file it, get it out of our consciousness and move on. But when we do, it takes on that smell – the smell of something we know.

So, here you are studying for a test. You come across a paragraph about some topic you never really understood the first time – perhaps how a bi-metal strip heat detector really works. So the first time you read it, years ago maybe, you did this – you said, ah what’s that, I don’t really get it – well it’s probably some kind of coil that expands, ok, move on. So now, today, when you see that, it registers as something you know, because it’s in there. It went in as a guess or a speculation, but now it registers as something you know. You can see what’s coming, right?

You pass on by it, checking it off as something you know. Then on the test, there’s a question about it. A question that your sense of knowing it doesn’t cover. Because, of course, you don’t know it. You never did. But you felt like you did. It’s a betrayal. Your mind tricks you, and you’re the victim of it.

And we all do that as automatically as breathing. Ten times a day. Usually, we never get caught either. But we sure do on a test. So what can we do about it? 

There is a remedy. We must force an answer. The procedure for studying for a written test is well covered in another Firehouse article, “How to Study for the Written Exam,” and that procedure takes care of this. But it doesn’t take care of it for simply reading a book or a practice test. You have to specifically force an answer.

You have to read a paragraph, then ask yourself, out loud, what it said, and answer, out loud, or in writing. It has to be done out loud or in writing. If you do it inside, mentally, then it’s vulnerable to this “already known” phenomenon. People fall into this with a practice test too when they have the answers. They mentally read the question, mentally pick an answer, then look at key and say yep, I knew that. You can’t do that. You have to write down your answers and then look at the key. You have to get the information outside your brain and into words or writing. That’s the only way to defeat this phenomenon.

No doubt you’ve experienced this. You’ve gotten a test back and been stunned by the low score. Your reaction is, “How can that be! I knew that material.” Well, this is how. It happens. It happens to us all. And this is how you avoid it.

HENRY MORSE, BA, MA, BA, NFPA Instructor Level IV, is the president of Fire Service Testing Company, Inc., which tests emergency services jurisdictions across North America for entry and promotion of personnel. Author of a number of books, including Emergency Services Personnel Testing Practices (2013), Preparing for Emergency Services Testing (2005), and others, he is a member of the NFPA 1001 Technical Committee and speaks on these topics and others related to testing and communication.

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