How to pass a BIT

There is this famous external degree program of which the name starts with B ends with T and has an I somewhere in the middle. It’s such a fun exercise, my friend and me used to go for the exams they conduct, at times just knowing the topic of the exam and nothing more. Most importantly we managed to get through the exam. It became a very simple exercise from the day we deciphered the 'art' of tackling MCQs with multiple answers.

It has exam papers which comes with the following guide lines,
• Each question will have five choices with one or more correct answers.
• All questions will carry equal marks.
• There will be a penalty for incorrect responses to discourage guessing.
• The mark given for a question will vary from 0 to +1 (All the correct choices are marked & no incorrect choices are marked)

Assume that you have the following question.
Question 1: Select the Asian country/ies from the given list?
a. Sri Lanka
b. Georgia
c. England
d. United States
e. France

Assuming that you are the only candidate in the exam hall hence no one else to copy from, you do not have access to google to find it out for you and you are not sure whether if Georgia is an Asian country or not, what will be your answer?
This is the way I would answer, use common sense and eliminate c,d and e. Then we are left with a and b. Now the analysis starts, out of which I know a is an Asian country, now
if I select only a,

• If a and b are both correct I will get 0.5 marks
• If a is the only correct answer, I will get 1 mark
• So minimum I get is 0.5 and maximum I get is 1

On the other hand, If I select both a and b

• If a and b both are correct I get 1 mark
• If a is the only correct answer, I will get 0.75
• So for this option the minimum is 0.75 and the maximum is 1

Now it doesn't take rocket science to figure out what is the best answer to maximize the return with a almost no risk!

This same technique can be extended to counter single answer questions and questions with 2 three 3 break, its just a question of elimination and it you don’t need to know the answer. But now I wonder what the purpose of passing exams like this?!