A student's choice of an answer to a test question is a coarse measure of his knowledge about the subject matter of the question. Much finer measurement might be achieved if the student were asked to estimate, for each possible answer, the probability that it is the correct one. Such a procedure could yield two classes of benefits: (a) students…

Technical improvements, which may be made in the reliability and validity of tests through confidence scores, are discussed. However, studies indicate that subjects do not handle their confidence uniformly. (MS)