  Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are commonly used to evaluate the
capabilities of large language models (LLMs). One common way to evaluate the
model response is to rank the candidate answers based on the log probability of
the first token prediction. An alternative way is to examine the text output.
Prior work has shown that first token probabilities lack robustness to changes
in MCQ phrasing, and that first token probabilities do not match text answers
for instruction-tuned models. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the
robustness of text answers. We show that the text answers are more robust to
question perturbations than the first token probabilities, when the first token
answers mismatch the text answers. The difference in robustness increases as
the mismatch rate becomes greater. As the mismatch reaches over 50\%, the text
answer is more robust to option order changes than the debiased first token
probabilities using state-of-the-art debiasing methods such as PriDe. Our
findings provide further evidence for the benefits of text answer evaluation
over first token probability evaluation.
