Tutoring For All Ages

Every year, we take on plenty of students who are about to take a particular standardized test for the first time. In our first lesson with a new Testing student, the “guessing question” usually comes up within the first 20 minutes. Most people have talked through the issue with their friends and/or teachers, but they still want to hear it from us.

So, for all our honorary students who just don’t happen to be in the same zip code as we are, we will try to answer the general question with a few tips:

1. You don’t have to answer the questions in the order in which they’re presented. Many tests/test sections arrange their questions in general order of difficulty, but the test writers’ general order of difficulty may not be your personal order of difficulty. So feel free to go through the test a few times. First, answer all the questions you know immediately. Then, answer the questions you didn’t know immediately, but knew you could do with a little time/thought. Then, take whatever time is left to answer the questions that are really hard for you. Those may or may not be the questions that the test makers thought would actually be the most difficult. This is especially true if every question is worth the same number of points — which is usually the case on a standardized test. Pick the low-hanging fruit first.
2. Whether or not you should attempt to answer all the questions depends on your target score. If you’re going for a perfect or near-perfect score, you obviously have to answer all the questions. But what if you’re aiming for a 600 on an SAT subject test? You should feel free to skip at least a few questions. Take the SAT Biology test, for example: if you’re going for a 600, you’re going for a raw score of 50 out of 80. There are many ways to get that score, all the way from answering 50 questions right and omitting 30 questions to answering 56 questions right and 24 wrong. The former is unlikely, the latter is possible, but not efficient. Getting 24 questions wrong out of 80 means you’re spending more than a quarter of your time on questions you’re not going to get any credit for anyway. For some fraction of those, you probably know they’re questions you’re not likely to get right. So why waste your time? Skip those entirely and spend your time checking your answers to other questions you know how to do, but may have made careless mistakes on.
3. Don’t skip the skipping strategy. Some test prep books will explicitly give guidelines on how many questions to skip as a function of your target score. Others will just give you the raw score chart and expect you to figure out how many to skip from that. Either way, this knowledge is important to your test-taking strategy, so it’s worth the time spent looking it up and/or figuring it out.
4. Before you move on, eliminate. It’s almost always worth it to spend 10 seconds on a multiple-choice question just to see if you can eliminate answers that are obviously wrong (being wary of tricks, of course). If you can eliminate wrong answers, you should probably guess rather than omit the question entirely.
5. Wrong-answer penalties are not as big a deal as you might think. They’re generally designed so that, if you randomly guess on all the questions without first eliminating wrong answer choices, your score will be the same as if you had omitted all the questions. Guessing randomly probably won’t hurt you — it’s just that if there’s a wrong-answer penalty, it won’t help you either. Consider whether or not the test has a wrong-answer penalty, but don’t let it faze you if it does.

One last note: every test is different, so it’s important to figure out an individual skipping/guessing strategy for each test you take, since the strategy for two tests with the same target score can vary greatly. For example, trying for a 750 on the SAT Math level 1 test means you have to try all the questions and you can only miss a few, but achieving a 750 on the SAT Physics test is possible if you skip 5 questions and get about 12 questions wrong. You never know — without a skipping strategy, you could be putting needless pressure on yourself to answer every question.