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JonahSinick comments on Advanced Placement exam cutoffs and superficial knowledge over deep knowledge - Less Wrong
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So, multiple choice questions are easier to hack than other kinds of questions, but if you "guess" the right answer 80% of the time, that's not really guessing. I think you underestimate the degree to which lots of background knowledge implies lots of subject knowledge / how much autodidactic knowledge clever people pick up just by paying attention and being curious.
(My school didn't offer Econ classes, but I took both AP Econ tests with about a day's worth of prep with an exam book, and believe I got 5 on both of them. Not surprising for someone who read econ books for fun and argued about economics on the internet in his spare time!)
It depends how obvious it is that some of the answers are wrong.
Obvious, of course, is a two-place word.
One experience I had that highlighted the importance of background knowledge for me was playing Alexei's Calibration Game. I had literally no knowledge about the sports questions- after confirming that, I just clicked A every time, and had 50% accuracy. But one of the categories of questions was "which of these postmasters general of the US served first?", which I was able to get 60-70% accuracy on, just by replacing that with the question "which of these two American names is more old-timey?"
I doubt a recent Chinese immigrant to the US would be able to hit 60% accuracy with that approach, because they don't have that good a sense of what's "old-timey" in the US. (And that's with only two options!) I've seen a handful of prep tests for subjects I know very little about, and my guessing accuracy there is close to chance.
Another way to put this: with multiple choice tests, reversed stupidity is intelligence, and that's a failing of the test. But identifying stupidity is a skill that requires some expertise.
But the expertise might not be in the area that's ostensibly being tested.